Arun Vaidyanathan

Director Arun Vaidyanathan's Achchamundu! Achchamundu! is the culmination of a two-decade dream and hardwork on celluloid. There's no escape from the creative bug and the director, who grew up in Sirkali, a small temple town in southern India, took an instant liking to arts from his childhood. And even as he was in college, Arun sought an identity for himself, producing and performing in TV shows in his mother tongue Tamil. It was here that he was first exposed to international cinema when he worked on a Hollywood movie review program, which, needless to say, was a huge hit.

The leap towards film-making was not immediate, however. It might have been a plush job in a software company that took him to USA, near the hub of fimmaking, but Arun had other plans. Having found his calling, he quit his job and chose to study the nuances of filmmaking at the New York Film Academy in 2003. Subsequently, he worked on short films that have been screened at many film festivals across the world including the Athens science fiction & fantasy film festival, Bollywood and Beyond film festival at Germany, IAAC New York and the Festivus film festival. The Seance won IFC's Media Lab award, Official selection in so many festivals including Triggerstreet, co-founded by Academy award winner Kevin Spacey and was also one of the weekly nominees in the Sundance/SciFi channel exposure contest. One Soul bagged him a director's citation at the Blackmaria Film Festival. It also won a Best cinematography award at the Terror Film Festival.

Arun's creative ideologies have been moulded by a mix of eastern and western cultures and philosophies. He seeks to make a niche for himself by replicating this in his movies - and marrying the East & the West. This is the key underlying theme of his first feature film, Achchamundu Achchamundu. The film, a psychological thriller, has already been awarded the Best Homegrown Feature Film at the Garden State Film Festival. This film won 'Best feature film' and cash prize at 7th Chennai International film festival and shown at various prestigious festivals including Shanghai International Film Festival, Cairo International film festival and International Film Festival of India, Goa.Even as his many-year dream comes to fruition with Achchamundu! Achchamundu!, it is only the beginning of another of Arun's dreams: to transcend parochial borders, and make films for everyone.