Seattle tech scene stars in new Indian detective movie

"Vellai Pookal" means "dandelions" in the Tamil language, and it’s also the name of a new bi-language detective thriller set in Seattle.

It’s the creation of a group of Indian expats who work for leading tech companies here, including Microsoft and Amazon.

More than a decade ago they launched a Tamil-language performance group in Seattle called Indus Creations. Over the years the group has done 10 big theater shows, and a number of short films.

But making a feature-length film meant working on an entirely new scale, which producers compared to launching a new kind of global tech start-up that drew on all of their talents in the tech world and the arts.

The movie tells the story of a retired cop from the state of Tamil Nadu in Southern India who arrives here to visit his son, a Microsoft employee. He's a sort Columbo character who ends up investigating a series of disappearances, without much encouragement from local law enforcement.

The film also explores some of the tensions South Asian immigrants face here in the United States -- younger generations inevitably disappointing their parents, finding the right ingredients to make a proper Indian meal.

The film was shot mostly in the Tamil language with some English. Tamil is spoken by around 75 million people around the world and is the official language in a portion of Southern India, as well as Sri Lanka and Singapore.

Chennai, Tamil Nadu is the home of Tamil-language film production in India. It's known as Kollywood as opposed to Bollywood, which refers to Hindi-language films made in Mumbai (formerly Bombay).

But this new Tamil-language film is something entirely different: Made in the Northwest, with talent from around the world.

Maybe Sollywood? (for Seattle) or Rollywood? (for Redmond).

The film was funded mostly with money earned in Seattle tech, which allowed filmmakers to fly in big-name actors from India including Vivek, an award-winning Indian actor who plays the retired cop.

Krishna Iyer is one of the film's executive producers. In his day job he's a manager in Amazon's Kindle division, where he manages half a dozen teams of software engineers around the globe to improve the book shopping experience.

He said making this movie across borders was similar work, where they used the latest technology to collaborate. “I don't know if 10 or 15 years ago we could have pulled this off,” Iyer said.

Chavi Khare is an actor with the group Indus Creations, and a software engineer at Microsoft who worked as the casting director and associate director for the film.

Like Iyer, she said the project drew on her experience in tech, where in both cases, “you are working with people from multiple different backgrounds, multiple different cultures and under really tight, pressure situations.”

But what she learned on the film set has also influenced her work life in tech, where it can sometimes be difficult for women to be heard.

This movie was a chance to take a leadership role, which she hasn't had at Microsoft.

“Overall, in the tech industry, we have miles to go before we achieve a good ratio of women leadership,” Khare said.