Had someone asked the protagonist of Vimanam how far he would go to fulfil his son’s wishes, he would have replied, ‘till the very end’. The Telugu-Tamil bilingual written and directed by Siva Prasad Yanala narrates a story that hinges heavily on the bond between a single father and his young son. It stems from a space of earnestness in wanting to show that love can transcend all odds. Differently-abled Veerayya’s (Samuthirakani) efforts to fulfil his son Raju’s (master Dhruvan) wish of an air journey encounters multiple hurdles. The film has segments that can leave the audience teary-eyed. But as the odds keep getting stacked against the father-son duo, the narrative gets contrived, emotionally manipulative and feels at least a few decades old.
A sizeable portion of the Telugu version of Vimanam happens in a locality in the vicinity of the old Begumpet airport in Hyderabad in early 2008, just before the opening of the larger airport in Shamshabad. The period setting makes it feasible to tell a story of a boy who keeps gazing at aircraft from the crevices of a wall in the neighbourhood of the airport.
