“God created me for the field of art” says Mr. Nataraja Krishnamoorthy better known as Soorya Krishnamoorthy. And rightly so! Born in Kottayam in the year 1951, Mr. Krishnamoorthy joined the ISRO as a scientist in the year 1972 only to resign some years later. He plunged into his passion, the world of cinema, music and art, and thus was born ‘Soorya Stage and Film Society’, Asia’s biggest cultural society according to the Limca Book of Records. The 75 day-long Soorya festival held annually in Thiruvananthapuram is considered to be the longest festival of Asia. Soorya is now set to break this record with a 101 day-long festival in 2008 on its 31st anniversary. Kerala Tourism Magazine caught up the founder of this trail-blazing art society.
We started with the beginning…

Soorya was started in Thiruvananthapuram 31 years ago at a time when there was no art or cultural society in the State. “Soorya is actually on offshoot of Chithralekha, the film society started by Mr. Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Chithralekha was formed to educate people about the value of good cinema and film appreciation. However, when Adoor Gopalakrishnan had to leave Chithralekha, it went dead. We were left halfway, knew something about cinema, not fully educated. That was when we started Soorya,” says Mr. Krishnamoorthy. The aim was to educate and enlighten the people about the value of Indian tradition, culture and world cinema.

While Chithralekha had stuck to cinema, Mr. Krishnamoorthy was very particular that Soorya would include other forms of art too, which were there in cinema like music, acting, dancing, etc. So Soorya became a cultural organisation concerned with screening of good films, presenting film directors and holding their retrospectives, holding seminars and discussions on cinema, conducting festivals of classical music and dance, theatre, painting, photography, handicrafts, talks, video, and light and sound shows.“As far as cinema was concerned, we had two main aims when we started Soorya. One was to ensure women’s participation. And we have achieved that! When we screen a film of artistic excellence, almost 50 per cent of the audience is women. No other society in the world can boast of this credit,” says Soorya’s founder.