Sing Geetham: At 94, This Director Just Made The Boldest Musical Indian Cinema Has Seen In Years

Some filmmakers slow down with age. Singeetham Srinivasa Rao decided to reinvent the musical instead.

Sing Geetham, now streaming on Netflix, is the veteran director’s first film in a decade — and it’s every bit as experimental as fans hoped. Set in Kuberapuram, a village stripped bare by gold mining, the story follows Gauri, the devoted guardian of the last surviving tree, and Prathap, a man who returns home chasing his family’s buried gold. When the tree falls, the entire village loses the ability to speak — communicating only through song.

It’s a wildly ambitious premise for a film from a director who has spent decades reinventing South Indian cinema through experimentation, and remarkably, it mostly works.

Sing Geetham: Overview

Why This Film Stands Out

What makes Sing Geetham genuinely refreshing is its refusal to play safe. Every emotion — joy, anger, grief — unfolds entirely through music, and while that choice feels gimmicky in the opening stretch, it settles into something surprisingly natural as the story progresses. There are no larger-than-life heroes here either, just flawed, relatable people shaped by greed, guilt, and circumstance.

Devi Sri Prasad’s soundtrack does much of the heavy lifting, weaving seamlessly into the narrative rather than sitting on top of it. The film does drag in stretches, and some visual effects don’t quite land, but its ambition alone makes it a rare, worthwhile watch for anyone tired of formulaic storytelling.

Looking for more Telugu and Tamil titles worth streaming this week? TechnoSports has a roundup of everything else hitting OTT right now.

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