Chennai, Feb 23 (IANS): Debutant Tamil director Prabhu Raja Cholan says the source of inspiration for his upcoming romantic-comedy "Karuppampatti" is a newspaper article. He says he developed the story with commercial elements infused in facts from the article.

"The basic knot of the story is inspired from a newspaper article. It was recently that I read an article about a foreigner coming to India in search of his familial roots. Based on this simple premise, I developed a plot for the film," Cholan told IANS.

"I obviously couldn't make a film entirely based on the article because of certain constraints. Instead, I chose to retain the crux of the article in my film and developed characters and some commercial elements around it," he added.

He says the film is shot in three different eras.

"Since the story of the film has a period flavour, we have three different eras. The first one is that of the time period before 1980s. It is shot in black-and-white mode. The second one is Eastman colour era, and it is here that we have included a Tamil disco number by Bappi Lahiri, while the third is shot in present day," said Cholan.

"The story of the film is about an Indian, born and raised in France, who comes to India in search of his roots. He arrives at a village called Karuppampatti and what happens there, forms the rest of the story," he said.

The film features Ajmal Ameer in dual roles alongside Piaa Bajpai and Alice Tantardini. It also stars Archana, M.S. Bhaskar, Jagan, Srinath and Devadarshini.

Queried about his choice of Bappi Lahiri for a song in the film, Cholan said: "It was a 1980s disco number and we wanted someone whose voice will also suit the era. It is then we zeroed in Bappi sir, the disco king, who introduced the disco numbers into India".

Sundar K has produced the film, which has music by Kannan. It is getting ready for release soon.