I want cinema to be a point of discussion, says the director of LGBT: A Legal Battle

Director P. Suneel Kumar Reddy speaks at the screening and interactive session about his film LGBT: Legal Battle in Visakhapatnam. | Photo credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

On the sidelines of the screening of LGBT: The Legal Battle organized by the Vizag Film Society in the city recently, award-winning director P. Suneel Kumar Reddy spoke to The Hindu about the making of the film, the challenges faced by the transgender community and where his career is headed next.

An engineer by training who once ran a newspaper in Visakhapatnam, Mr. Reddy entered the film industry in 2000. 26 years and 27 films later, he still describes himself as a journalist at heart. “For me, every film is a journalistic activity,” he said. “I research the subject point by point and learn a lot before telling the story.

This research ethic has taken him across genres. He began as a children’s filmmaker, with Hero (2003), which traveled to the Cairo International Film Festival, before Sontha Ooru and Ganga Putrulu transformed him into a maker of serious cinema, and later romantic crime dramas earned him a reputation for stories about young people.

LGBT: The Legal Battle, a courtroom drama about the legal battles faced by transgender and gay individuals, represents his latest turnaround and, he says, his personal transformation. In preparation, he consulted with Supreme Court attorneys, sessions judges, and the law school, and spent time in the community’s own spaces to understand its life beyond what was visible from the outside.

He also insisted on casting real transgender performers rather than cisgender actors. “I wanted to give cinema authenticity,” he said.

Mr. Reddy emphasizes that his films are not meant to teach. “It’s not about changing society, it’s about helping as a catalyst for people,” he said. “I want cinema to be a discussion point rather than a place where we give answers to questions.”

That philosophy, he hopes, will now go further. Sravya Films, his production banner, has tied up with Gradiente Infotainment Limited to dub LGBT: A Legal Battle into several Indian languages, ahead of its international release.

Born in Nellore, which he calls his janmabhoomi, Mr Reddy considers North Andhra his karmabhoomi, the area where he grew up, studied and built his career. He remains invested in Visakhapatnam’s potential as a center for filmmaking and continues to cast local and Uttarandhra artists in his work. His next project marks a return to where he started: a bilingual children’s sci-fi film in Telugu and Hindi along with several other productions currently in discussion.

Published – 12 Jul 2026 20:38 IST