M. Manikandan

Kutrame Thandanai is the story of a mild-mannered collections agent in desperate need of money. He debates whether needs define morality and whether it is fine to co-opt with corruption by staying silent when he discovers the dead body of his young, female neighbour.

Half Ticket is a story of two slum kids and their absolute focus to get what they cannot dare to dream of.

The title of the film comes from the boys' nicknames: they steal crows' eggs because their mother cannot afford chicken eggs. The two young brothers live in a Chennai slum house with their mother and grandmother. Their father is in jail for an offense that is not stated and the family has no money because they are paying a lawyer to defend him. The boys are devastated when the tree where they find crows eggs is pulled down. Then, a brand-new pizza shop is opened on the vacant block where the tree once stood. They and the other slum children are amazed by the shiny new pizza shop. Then one day, a pizza delivery man finds himself lost in the slum. The boys agree to show him the way out, but first he must let them smell the pizza. They are enraptured. But they are shocked to hear that a pizza costs 300 rupees. When their mother brings an old television home, the boys see a pizza commercial and they tell their mother about the new pizza shop. Their grandmother says she can make one for a fraction of the cost, and looking at the picture in the shop's advertising brochure, she guesses at the ingredients and cooks one on their little stove. But the cheese is invisible, having melted, and the resultant "pizza" is rejected by the boys. They begin the quest to have their first taste of pizza. They collect lumps of coal that have fallen from trains along the railway tracks. This only earns them a few rupees. But an adult friend of theirs shows them where they can steal coal from a storage dump, and they are on their way. However, when they go the pizza shop shop, they are sent off because of the dirty, ragged clothes they wear. So now, they must find some new clothes. After stealing more coal, they take a bus to the city center. They realize that they will never be let in a clothes shop. But ever resourceful, they see two rich boys whose father has forbidden them to buy food from a street vendor. They buy the food in exchange for the new clothes the rich boys have bought. Now, they are ready, and walk back into their slum dressed like a million rupees. But when they go back to the pizza shop, they are again refused, and the shop-owner even strikes the older brother down with his hand. The boys are humiliated, and their friends have caught the whole scene on video on a stolen mobile phone. They walk back, dejected, to their slum home to find their grandmother has died. Their mother cannot afford the funeral service, so the brothers give her the money that had been meant for pizza. Meanwhile, the video of the boys' rejection by the pizza shop has found its way to the local television. There is a storm of indignation at the treatment of slum children, and the pizza shop owners are in damage control. They decide to find the boys and offer them free pizzas. The police go to find them, but their mother has no idea where they are. Eventually, they are tracked down, and the police take them to the pizza shop, where they are given a movie star welcome. They are seated in the shop and given free pizza. The supreme irony is that once they have tasted it, they agree they don't really like it at all! "What are we going to do with the rest of it?" they ask each other.