The Disciple returns India to Venice fest race
Seoul, Sept. 3: A film about a classical musician’s struggle to balance his career dreams and life in contemporary Mumbai will this week return India to the main competition at the Venice Film Festival for the first time in nearly two decades.
Writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple is among the 18- films selected for competition at the festival, which opened Wednesday. The last Indian film in competition was
Monsoon Wedding by Mira Nair, which in 2001 won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion.
Tamhane spent four years researching, filming and editing The Disciple, which follows a would- be classical music vocalist who struggles to balance his craft’s centuriesold traditions with contemporary Mumbai.
His film is slated to premiere on Friday and despite travel restrictions and precautions due to the coronavirus pandemic, Tamhane
plans to be there.
“It’s been my dream, in a way to, you know, ( to) be in competition at the festival,” he said. “You know, there would be no bigger high than presenting the film in person at Venice.”
“I started off almost like a journalist, you know, attending concerts, interviewing musicians and hanging out in these spaces that they inhabit. So it took me two years to do the research, travel around the country and write the script,” Tamhane, 33, said in an interview last month.
“Indian classical musicians — there is a general perception that they are very serious and, you know, and they are very sort of solemn and also somber. And once you start hanging out with them and once you start kind of talking to them, you realize that they’re just as normal, as ordinary as all of us,” he said.
“And they’re also in their respective field facing the same kind of issues, the same kind of problems that, you know, a journalist would be facing or an athlete would be facing.”