Between Ooru, Area, and Pettai: The Terms of the Local in Tamil Cinema of the Twenty-First Century

This article focuses on films that star the young Tamil cinema actor Dhanush and that are set in Madurai and surrounding nonmetropolitan locations in the state of Tamil Nadu. Through these films, the article examines the construct of the area or the pettai as a production of the local in the age of so-called globalization, and what implications this formation has for an understanding of the relationship between cinema and space in the context of Tamil films produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This construct of the pettai is viewed through questions on regionality, globalization, mobility, and gender, in an effort to understand the contemporariness of these films.