My name is Akhil A. and I am from Chennai, a place in the Southern part of India. My entire life I had only one dream and that is to become a movie director. Towards my dream, I had many bad experiences, but somehow I managed to launch my career.

India was put under lockdown from March 25th to April 8th, in 2020. My team waited to start the production once the government lifted the lockdown. But lockdown continued for 74 days till 7th June, with each phase of lockdown witnessing some relaxation of movement and economic activities. Towards the end of May 2020, the producer got into some financial conflict with his partners due to the fall of the business firm he had. Lockdown and pandemic affected the man very seriously. But the effect didn’t stop with him, it spread towards the entire team including me.

One day he called me and said “we are not going to start this movie,” because he was not in a position to start a film at that time. He also advised me to search for some other producers as he was not going to make a movie any time soon. By mid-June, the film industry started waking up slowly. I took my bounded script and walked in and out of every production company in the town. Many producers liked the story and showed interest in the project. But the only request they made was to wait until they release the movie already completed. Since it was all coming back to normal, I had no problem with that.

Unfortunately, the industry had many movies to release and everybody didn’t get theatre. Days went on and few movies were released but didn’t do very well in the theatre. So, the producers became a little scared to take that step. Hence, they all waited for the right reopening to come. But what happened was the opposite. The situation became worse!

Now the government has introduced strict lockdown and ordered all the theatres to close again. The producers are not ready to invest in my project because they are not sure about the release of the film. I cannot blame them for doing that, because their situation has to be understood. We are now waiting for the day when all dreams will come true. And we all know clearly without a shadow of a doubt, it will happen only when we are free from COVID-19.

I don’t know ‘when or how’ about the situation. But I strongly believe ‘there is a day,’ and on that day things will come in my favor. I live by that belief and have never thought about quitting. I’ll never quit!