Santosh Rai Pathaje is an ace Cinematographer and Director of Kannada Film Industry, also known popularly as Sandalwood. He is the Cinematographer of many Kannada movies like Bhaava Bhamaida, Law and Order, etc.
He comes from the small town of ajirangala Kaniyoor, near Puttur and near of charvaka(shobha karandlaje native), on the Dakshina Kannada coast of Karnataka. He studied at St. Aloysius's in Mangalore, and then went on to graduate in journalism.
After attempting bits of writing and journalism, he studied cinematography at the Government Film and TV Institute in Bangalore for which he made a project film, titled Antharamukhi, with 16mm Kodak film. Interestingly, this film too was made on a commercial movie type of subject. After that, he worked as an assistant photographer to Ashok Kashyap on big budget Kannada feature films like Shivaraj Kumar starring Bhaava Bhaimada and Law and Order with Sai Kumar for the Ramu Enterprises banner. Then, Rai moved to Mumbai for two years, where he did a range of corporate and advertising films.
"I really enjoyed that stint, because you can deliver great quality in such films," he explains. "You can take two or three days to make a film of just 30 seconds' duration, and your budget for it would be huge too." However, he agrees readily that feature films give better professional fulfillment and satisfaction to a cinematographer, and so, he has now shifted completely to this kind of film. "I only want to make the kind of films that people really like to see," he says. "In other words, I mean that I like making commercial films." Rai returned to his home state from Mumbai a year ago, with the idea of becoming a script writer and director. He came up with his own original story, that he called Seven O' Clock, and brought this rough script to Bangalore to try to sell it. Film producer N M Suresh liked his story, and promised to make a film out of it. However, at that time, Suresh was busy with his ongoing film Chappale, which was released recently. Meanwhile, Rai got offers to handle the camera for two more Kannada feature films, Mithayi Mane and a black comedy film called Mata, directed by Guruprasad, starring popular comedian Jaggesh, well known actor of former years Sudarshan.
He directed his first movie Seven O' Clock for Producer N M Suresh with a unique story, good music and efficient picturisation. He was able extract good performances from his lead cast Mithun Thejaswi and Pooja kanwal. However he chose not be the Cinematographer of this movie rather handling that to his good friend and ace cinematographer Chandrashekar. It seems there was a pact between the two Cinematographers that if at all anyone of them would direct a movie the other one would be the cameraman. Even though the movie was very good it failed to click at the Box office.
He directed his second movie Savi Savi Nenapu with Prem, Mallika Kapoor and Tejaswini which also had excellent music and very good Cinematography by his friend Chandrashekar. But owing to the complex story of the movie it failed to click with the audiences. Later it was also dubbed to telugu as well.
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