At 94, Indian director has toppled Clint Eastwood’s world record with his 61st film

There is a record that has stood in world cinema for years, held by one of Hollywood’s most enduring figures. It no longer belongs to Clint Eastwood. It belongs to a filmmaker from Gudur in Andhra Pradesh.

Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, born in 1931, has helmed Sing Geetham, his 61st film, at the age of 94 years. Eastwood directed his most recent film, Juror No. 2, starting at 93 years, with the film releasing when he was 94 years. Singeetam has already surpassed both milestones and is still on the job. By any reasonable measure, he is now the oldest filmmaker in the world actively leading a major production.

Sing Geetham is being described as India’s first musical fantasy. The film stars Ayaan, Ahilya Bamroo and Shalini Kondepudi, all relatively new faces. Music is composed by Devi Sri Prasad, in his first collaboration with Singeetham Srinivasa Rao. The screenplay is co-written by Singeetham with Gautami Challagulla, Shashank, Sreekar, Nanda Kishore Emani and Rahul V. Rajeshwar. The film is produced by Nag Ashwin under the Vyjayanthi Movies and Swapna Cinema banners. The film is slated to release worldwide on June 11.

Who is Singeetham Srinivasa Rao?

Singeetham Srinivasa Rao began his journey in cinema as an assistant to K.V. Reddy, one of the most respected directors Telugu cinema has produced, working on films including the 1957 classic Mayabazar. By the time he stepped behind the camera himself, he had spent years studying not just how films were made but why they worked on an audience.

Over the next six decades, he directed roughly sixty films across Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi and English. Singeetham Srinivasa made social dramas, slapstick comedies, science fiction, folklore, biopics and, most famously, a mainstream film without a single word of dialogue. He rarely made the same kind of film twice. In an industry that has always rewarded familiarity, that was a choice, and he made it deliberately, every time.

His 1985 biopic Mayuri, based on the life of classical dancer Sudha Chandran who lost her leg and returned to the stage, won a record fourteen Nandi Awards and fundamentally changed how the Telugu film industry approached real-life stories. Then came Pushpaka Vimana in 1987. The film starred Kamal Haasan and did not give him a single spoken line. The entire story was told through physical comedy, visual rhythm and silence. At the time, the idea of a mainstream Indian film without dialogue, built around one of Tamil cinema’s biggest stars, was the kind of gamble that should not have paid off but it did.

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The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s International Critics’ Week, received the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment, and was later included in CNN-IBN’s list of the hundred greatest Indian films of all time. It remains, nearly four decades later, a film that people return to.

In 1989 came Apoorva Sagodharargal, a comedy-drama built around dwarfism that screened at the International Film Festival of India.

Singeetham Srinivasa made one of his famous works, Aditya 369, in 1991, a science fiction film about time travel that became one of the highest-grossing Telugu films of that year at a point when science fiction in South Indian cinema was not a genre.

His seven-film collaboration with Kannada superstar Rajkumar produced an unbroken run of commercially successful and critically respected work through the 1980s. Several of those films were later remade in Telugu. Across the board, whether he was working in Hyderabad, Chennai, or Bangalore, the result was the same: films that audiences went to see and critics found difficult to ignore.

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Directors like Nag Ashwin, who made Kalki 2898 AD, and Prashanth Varma have spoken openly about the influence Singeetham Srinivasa Rao’s films had on how they think about fantasy, scale and storytelling. His last film before this return was Welcome Obama in 2013. After that, Singeetham Srinivasa has been away for over a decade. He is coming back with what he says is the most ambitious project of his life.