Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, the 94-year-old filmmaker whose career spans six decades and multiple languages, returned to the director’s chair on Thursday with Sing Geetham, a Telugu musical fantasy where every word of dialogue is sung. The film, produced by Nag Ashwin through Vyjayanthi Movies and Swapna Cinema, arrived in theatres on June 12 as one of the most formally daring Indian releases in years.
The premise centres on Kuberapuram, a mining village where illegal operations have stripped the land bare. When the last surviving tree is cut down, the residents find themselves cursed to communicate only through song. Pratap, played by Ayaan, arrives in the village after a stint in Bhopal jail for financial fraud and must navigate this bizarre world where spoken words have become impossible. Ahilya Bamroo plays Gowri, an environmental activist, while Shalini Kondepudi takes on the role of Renu, the daughter of the mining overlord.
The musical conceit is not decorative. Singeetham designed the entire film so that song replaces dialogue, creating a storytelling mode closer to opera than to the conventional Indian film musical where songs interrupt narrative. Devi Sri Prasad composed the score, giving the production a contemporary sonic palette while the 94-year-old director shaped the visual and narrative grammar around continuous musical expression.
Nag Ashwin, who directed some of Telugu cinema’s most ambitious recent productions including Kalki 2898 AD, backed the project through Vyjayanthi Movies. His involvement lent the film institutional credibility and production resources that a project this unconventional might not otherwise have secured. The pairing of a nonagenarian experimentalist with one of the industry’s most commercially successful young producers makes Sing Geetham an unusual proposition in an industry that tends to bet on proven formulas.
Singeetham’s career includes cult classics across Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Hindi cinema. He directed Aditya 369, one of the earliest Indian science fiction films, and Pushpak, a silent comedy starring Kamal Haasan that remains a landmark of wordless storytelling. His return to direction at 94 makes him among the oldest working filmmakers anywhere in the world, and Sing Geetham’s all-musical format echoes his lifelong interest in pushing the boundaries of what Indian cinema can formally achieve.
Early reviews describe the film as an inventive if uneven experiment. The Hollywood Reporter India called it a work that “brims with wit and whimsy,” praising its innocent humour and ecological messaging. Other outlets have noted that it resists evaluation by conventional commercial standards, functioning more as a filmmaker’s personal statement than a crowd-pleasing entertainer. Ratings have ranged from 2.75 to 3.25 out of 5, reflecting the split between critics who appreciate the ambition and those who find the execution inconsistent.
The film’s environmental theme, wrapped inside its musical structure, gives Kuberapuram’s curse a pointed allegorical edge. The loss of speech becomes a metaphor for ecological consequences, a community literally unable to function normally because it destroyed its natural resources. Whether audiences respond to a Telugu-language film built entirely on sung dialogue remains to be seen, but Sing Geetham’s existence is itself a statement about the range of storytelling still possible in Indian commercial cinema.
Sing Geetham is now playing in theatres across India. The film also stars Tulasi Shivamani and Banerjee in supporting roles.
