Thiagarajan Kumararaja

Thiagarajan Kumararaja is an Indian film director and screenwriter. He made his feature film debut with the critically acclaimed neo-noir gangster film Aaranya Kaandam, which earned him the Indira Gandhi Award for Best Debut Film of a Director at the 59th National Film Awards.

Career Kumararaja enrolled for a Visual Communications course at the Loyola College, Chennai, but dropped out shortly after to make films. Kumararaja cited that it was composer Ilaiyaraaja's music that animated him to come to films and to study Visual Communications in the first place. However, he discontinued his studies in 1998 and started to work as a freelance copywriter and photographer for a while. He went on to shoot advertisement films and also directed a five-part documentary on South Indian Temples, Sthala Puranam for Vijay TV. Kumararaja then collaborated with Pushkar-Gayathri, writing the dialogue of their directorial debut Oram Po (2007). Through Pushkar-Gayathri, Kumararaja met S. P. B. Charan, who agreed to produce his first feature film Aaranya Kaandam.

Kumararaja began writing his maiden film in December 2006. but Charan opted to produce another film first. Aaranya Kaandam was launched in December 2008, starring Ravi Krishna and Sampath Raj, with Bollywood actor Jackie Shroff, who was being introduced to Tamil films. Kumararaja took more than one and a half years to complete the film, which was entirely shot in and around Chennai. Upon completion, the film ran into trouble when the regional censor board in Chennai refused to clear it, demanding 52 cuts due to profanity and excessive violence. Kumararaja expressed that he made the film for a matured audience and not for children, while adding that he expected difficulties in the censorship. Since he wanted to present the film uncompromisingly to the audiences, he and Charan approached the Central Tribunal at Delhi, that cleared the film. Dubbed as the first neo-noir film in Tamil cinema, Aaranya Kaandam opened to strong critical acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Award for Best Film at the 2010 South Asian International Film Festival,

In 2015, he was involved as a script consultant for the Tamil film Yennai Arindhaal, which was co-written and directed by Gautham Vasudev Menon.

Filmography Note: all films are in Tamil, unless otherwise noted. As director

As writer and lyricist

Awards