The Madras High Court has granted an injunction against the removal of stunt directors Anbu and Arivu, who go by the screen name of Anbariv, after they were unceremoniously thrown out of the South Indian Cine & TV Stunt Artistes Union.
“We are very happy that the Madras HC has sided with the truth. We will make sure that everything is sorted out,” Anbu told Silverscreen.
“We went to FEFSI President RK Selvamani sir. He intervened and tried to resolve the dispute with our Union President Somasundar. But they did not listen. We had to seek legal help as a couple of Tamil films were stalled due to this,” he said.
Talking about the dispute, Anbu said that they were planning to contest for the post of president of the Stunt Union in the upcoming elections. This seems to have irked the current president Somasundar and secretary Manikandan. “They tried to level all sorts of false charges on us. We train stunt artistes in our offices before going to shoot a film. We do this so that they are well equipped for the scene. But, one day, Somasundar and Manikandan told us that what we were doing is illegal and that we should ask the producer to pay.”
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Anbu and Arivu tried telling them that the union doesn’t have any such rule. “They simply chose to remove us from the union. They did not give us any reason, and we were not even asked to make a case for ourselves. That is when Lokesh Kanagaraj (director of Maanagaram) suggested that perhaps we should approach the Madras HC,” said Anbu.
The HC has granted an injunction on the union’s decision to remove them from the membership.
The filming of Sivakarthikeyan’s upcoming science fiction film with Ravikumar was stalled due to this incident. Prabhu Deva’s Pon Manickavel faced the same fate as well. Anbu said that it is a testament to the honest approach they have towards work that the producers were fine with postponing the shoot of the film and not replace them with another stunt director.