Chennai: Director Varsha Bharath's film Bad Girl may have received bouquets at the various International film festivals it's been to. But here back home in India, the film has been facing heat even before its release.

Trouble started earlier this year when the makers of the film chose to release a teaser. While one section of the audience hailed the teaser and the film, saying it was bold and refreshing, another segment trashed it saying it was indulging in Brahmin bashing.

The film, which has been produced by directors Vetrimaaran and Anurag Kashyap, has Anjali Sivaraman playing the lead, with actors Shanthi Priya, Hridhu Haroon, Teejay Arunasalam, Sashank Bommireddipalli, and Saranya Ravichandran playing supportive roles.

With just three days to go for the film's release, ask Varsha if she is nervous and she replies, "Very nervous but also very excited because the public has seen it in different parts of the world. In Shanghai, in Rotterdam, in Poland, there was a screening in LA. I was present in all of those places. People from different walks of life, from different countries and different nationalities have already watched the film and the public response was overwhelmingly positive. All the awards we won have been audience awards. I know people are liking it. But this is home, right. We want people here to watch it and we are most excited about it."

Varsha’s film has definitely caught the attention of the audience even before its release.

“The entire film is a coming-of-age story about a girl. It is not a high-concept, fictional kind of film; rather, it is a very experiential movie,” the director reflected about her work.

“It is a slice-of-life kind of film. It is inspired by life, though not necessarily my own. It is a work of fiction, but it draws from everything I witnessed while growing up. I tried to make a movie based on what I observed and the emotions I felt,” Varsha said while speaking about the spark behind the story.

“I come from the community, and it is important for anyone to be self-critical about their own community because that is the way forward. It is not possible for us to criticise another community, as we don’t have the lived experience of growing up in that background,” Varsha responded to criticism that the film was targeting the Brahmin community.

“Because I am familiar with the milieu, I have set it in a milieu that I am most familiar with. If I was making a historical drama or a historical fiction, I would not try to derive from my personal experiences. I would depend on research. I will go dig deep and try to find out how people lived. Whereas if you are writing human drama, it is easier for you to write from your personal experiences. It came very naturally for me to set it in a milieu that I was most familiar with. I come from the community,” she added.

"If you had really watched my trailer and if you read it as it is, there is not one word that is spoken against any community within the trailer. It is just that there is a girl. She has got desires, she has got dreams, she's got good qualities, she's got bad qualities. This is a girl's story. And she belongs to a certain community,” Varsha went on to explain.

“Everybody here belongs to some community. To those who say, I could have done this or done that, my reply is 'No. This girl belongs to this community'. And she belongs to a privileged community and I do think that people from privileged communities are most likely to face the problems faced by this character because our life experiences are determined by where we come from."

“Another thing I would like to say is that it is very important for all of us to actually look at a movie like this. It is important for people to form their own opinions but only after watching the trailer. Many people are not watching it but are claiming the movie has been made in a certain way. Really, watch the trailer and then form your opinions. That is the problem right now,” Varsha concluded.