How a filmmaker’s return to his village birthed a film that spoke to an entire nation
Rishab Shetty’s journey to Kantara feels less like a film career and more like a pilgrimage. Long before his name lit up billboards and conversations, he was a young man from coastal Karnataka, carrying stories of land, belief, and belonging in his heart. “I once worked as an office boy in a production house at Andheri West,” he remembers. “I even drove a producer’s car. I never imagined that one day I’d be sitting inside that same office, narrating my own script.”
His beginnings were humble, but they shaped his sense of truth. In those years of uncertainty, Shetty observed people, language, and life itself elements that would later breathe through Kantara. Born and raised in the small village of Keradi, Kundapura, he grew up surrounded by rituals like Daiva aradhane and Bhoota Kola ceremonies that bridge the mortal and the divine. “These weren’t myths for us,” he once said in an interview with The Hindu. “They were lived experiences ,part of our everyday rhythm.”
The idea for Kantara took root during the pandemic, when Shetty returned to his village. He found himself listening again : to the forest, the wind, the old chants that once scared and soothed him as a child. Out of that stillness emerged a story , a conflict between man and nature, greed and faith, body and spirit. “I wanted to tell a story that belongs to the soil, yet speaks to everyone,” he said.
When filming began, Shetty moved his entire family to the shooting village. His children were born there, and even today they attend the same local school. “If I stayed away from my roots, the film would lose its soul,” he explains. Every frame of Kantara carries that conviction : the earthy dialects, the energy of folk artists, the rituals recreated with reverence.
The film’s success surprised even him. Kantara broke regional barriers, resonating with audiences far beyond Karnataka. Yet, Shetty insists he has not let the applause change him. “I don’t feel overjoyed or pressured,” he told India Today. “Success is not in numbers. It’s in the honesty of your work.”
Now, as Kantara 2 takes shape, Shetty’s outlook remains the same: calm, grounded, deliberate. “Life is like a river,” he says quietly. “If you try to stop it, it stagnates. Let it flow truthfully.”
In his world, cinema isn’t just storytelling ,it’s soul-telling. And for Rishab Shetty, the real hero’s journey is not toward fame, but back to where it all began , the soil that taught him how to walk with truth.
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