Director cum star hero Prithviraj Sukumaran’s prestigious film ‘The Goat Life’. Directed by award winning director Blessy, the movie is based on the novel The Goat Days written by Benjamin. This is a true story. Produced by Visual Romance banner, the Telugu version of the film is being distributed by Mythri Movie Makers. It will be released on March 28 in the pan India range. On this occasion, the pre-release press meet was organized by the film unit.
Recently I came to you with Salaar in the character of King Varadaraja Mannar. Now I am going to come on screen with the character of a slave named Najeeb in the movie “The Goat Life”. Varadaraja Mannar is purely Prashanth Neel’s imagination. But this movie is a true story. Najib is alive among us. He migrated to the Gulf countries in the 90s for livelihood. Goat Days is the book he wrote describing the hardships he faced during this journey.
This book written by Benjamin was published in 2008 in Kerala. As soon as it was published, it went into everyone’s hands. Goat Days is so popular. Every director, hero and producer in Kerala tried to get the rights of this novel. Finally our director Blessy got those rights. Fortunately, I got the chance to act as Najeeb. We committed to this film in early 2009. But at that time it was impossible to spend the required budget for this film. We started shooting in 2018 after ten years.By then the market level of regional films had increased. The popularity of Malayalam movies has increased.
We started shooting in 2019. Scheduled in Jordan. We have completed the Kerala portions. I first gained weight for this film and then lost 31 kg. We took a gap of 7 months after a schedule to lose weight. Even now the budget of this film is risky. When we started shooting back in Jordan, there was a covid lockdown. We stopped shooting completely for three months.It was also difficult for us to return to India. We came to India in Vande Bharat special flight. It is not known whether the pandemic will ever end. After a year and a half, we started shooting in a place called Timmoun in Algeria. The location is in the middle of the Sahara desert. No film unit went there. Our Blessy sir is crazy about movies. All of us could shoot there because of him. Every artist of Malayalam industry wants to do at least one film with Blessy sir.Hero Prithviraj Sukumaran said he is such a great director.
The director-producer and other artistes expressed confidence in the success of the film along with their experiences.