Sometime in 2014, when Phanideep gazed at the street from his balcony on the third floor of a residential colony in Hyderabad, he spotted a boy trying to fly a kite. He took a photograph. “I was also a dreamer, like him,” he recalls. That image of a boy wanting to conquer the skies, coupled with his love for bikes, sowed the seed for the story of Ustaad, the Telugu feature film which he has written and directed.
Days before the film’s release on August 12, Phanideep is confident and yet nervous that his film releases in the same week as that of Rajinikanth starrer Jailer and Chiranjeevi starrer Bholaa Shankar. He says about Ustaad, which is the name of a bike in the film, and stars Sri Simha Koduri, Kavya Kalyanram, Gautham Menon, Anu Haasan and Ravindra Vijay, “If we get good feedback from the initial shows, the long weekend leading up to August 15 can work in our favour.”
