The biopic on the late chief minister of Andhra Pradesh YS Rajasekhara Reddy has reached the final stages of production. The film, in which Mammootty plays YSR, is set for a grand release on February 8th and its premiere in the Unites States of America will happen a day prior to it, on February 7th. Also, the film - titled Yatra - will be released in three languages, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil. It will be based on the famous Yatra that YSR undertook in 2003 which eventually put him on the chief minister’s chair.
Directed by Mahi V Raghav, the biopic has a bevy of stars in the cast including Jagapathi Babu, who plays YSR's father YS Raja Reddy, Rao Ramesh as KVP Ramachandra Rao, who was YSR's closest friend from his medical college days and Suhasini Mani Ratnam as the former minister Sabitha Indra Reddy. It also has Anasuya Bharadwaj, Posani Krishna Murali, Vinod Kumar and Sachin Khedekar in supporting roles. The director had decided to do away with YSR’s son Jegan Mohan Reddy’s character in the film altogether. Sources say that the director doesn’t want to deviate from concentrating on the famous Pada Yatra due to which he decided to remove Jegan’s character as it may shift the focus.
The film is produced by Vijay Chilla and Shashi Devireddy under the banner 70 MM Pictures and its technical crew includes K for music, Sathyan Sooryan for cinematography and A Sreekar Prasad for editing.
It may be mentioned here that the trailer of the YSR biopic Yatra was unveiled a few weeks ago. From the trailer, it is evident that the dialogues in it will be hard hitting and something to watch out for. Mammootty, it is believed, has done a lot of research to get into the skin of the character.
(Content provided by Digital Native)