Media365
4 min readHyderabadSep 28, 2026 07:58 PM IST
Director Srikanth Odela has publicly addressed the backlash surrounding one of the most talked-about and divisive scenes in The Paradise, in which the mother of Kayadu Lohar’s character Subbalakshmi refers to her daughter as a “single shot actress.” The line, played for laughs in the film, has drawn sharp criticism from audiences and critics, who have called it objectifying, regressive and tonally at odds with a film that positions itself as a story about human dignity and the fight against oppression.
In a post-release conversation with Nani, Odela acknowledged that the scene did not land as intended, explaining that the setup needed for it to work emotionally was lost in the edit.
Srikanth Odela explained that the mother’s comment was never meant to be dismissive or exploitative. According to him, the backstory of the character is rooted in two things: extreme poverty and a specific family dynamic built on a mother’s inability to believe in her daughter’s ambitions.
Also Read: How The Paradise objectified Kayadu Lohar in a film about fighting for dignity
He first addressed the economic reality that drives the character’s choices. “There is no food at home. Nothing at all. The father has left. Those reels and cameras are the only things they have as a means of support. When you have nothing, when there is literally no other way to put food on the table, the daughter uses the one skill she has. And the mother, who has no alternative to offer, facilitates it. Not because she wants to. Because there is nothing else,” Odela said.
According to Srikanth Odela, the mother never believed in her daughter’s ambition to become a mainstream actress. When the daughter ran away from home to pursue acting and eventually returned without having achieved anything, the mother’s disappointment hardened into a permanent lack of faith in her daughter’s talent. “The idea was that the mother is saying, ‘You ran away from home. Had you pursued acting properly, you could have been a great artiste.’ That is what I meant to convey through that scene. But it got communicated differently on screen. The setup just was not right in the movie.”
Odela was candid about why the intended meaning did not reach the audience. He pointed directly to the editing process and acknowledged that the setup required for the payoff to land emotionally was either trimmed or insufficiently developed in the final cut.
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“When you are dealing with a film of this length, you end up missing things. Sometimes it is the runtime that forces the cuts. Sometimes we simply miss it ourselves,” he said.
Nani then addressed the specific scene directly. “The payoff of that scene looks really good on paper. The setup we had written was strong. But during the editing process, the connection between the setup and the payoff broke. The payoff stopped making sense without the setup that was supposed to precede it. That is one of the issues with the film,” he said.
Nani went further, admitting that the specific complaints audiences raised about the heroine track were valid and traceable to scenes that were either cut or not given enough screen time. “The specific things audiences are pointing out, we somehow missed during the editing. Setting up the scene the right way, giving the audience the proper context before the payoff arrives, that is where we fell short. I genuinely feel that,” he said.
What happened in The Paradise
In The Paradise, Kayadu Lohar plays Subbalakshmi, also called Subbu, a young woman from a financially struggling family who aspires to be an actress. Unable to find legitimate work in the film industry, she resorts to making suggestive videos of herself and selling them, with her mother’s involvement. In one scene, the mother refers to her daughter as a “single shot actress,” a line that reduces the character’s entire identity to the nature of the content she produces.
