Hombale Films ventures into Kollywood with Keerthy Suresh

 In the movie poster, released along with the announcement, one can see Keerthy, dressed like a typical Tamil student, protesting against Hindi imposition. One can see the Hindi version of the town’s name scratched out from the board behind Keerthy. On the other side, one can see the word revolution written in Tamil and English. In fact, Hombale Films’ made their project announcement with the caption ‘Because revolution begins at home.’

Also, there’s an interesting story behind the film’s title - Raghu Thatha. Those who are familiar with Tamil films or Tamil comedies already know that ‘Raghu Thatha’ comes from the iconic comedy line ‘Ek gaon mein ek kisan Raghu Thatha’ from K Bhagyaraj’s 1981 film, Indru Poi, Naalai Vaa. The scene is a representation of struggles of learning Hindi language in South India. In this iconic scene, a Hindi teacher is seen teaching a Tamil man Hindi lessons with ‘Ek gaon mein ek kisan rehta tha’, and the student promptly repeating it with a minor modification - ‘Ek gaon mein ek kisan Raghu Thatha’ - thus leaving the audience in splits. It’s been 4 decades, but still the comedy line hasn’t lost its sheen.

Suman Kumar, who had previously written ‘Family Man’ webseries, is writing and directing Raghu Thatha. Hombale Films is looking at a stellar 2023 with projects like Prabhas-starrer Salaar (Telugu), Fahaad Fasil-starrer Dhoomam (Malayalam), Bhageera with Sri Murali and now, a Tamil film, Raghu Thatha. All these projects are billed to be pan-India projects.