Cinema: Triumph of the Independence Movement

It was a proud moment for the Tamil film industry when Vetrimaaran’s thought-provoking crime drama Visaranai became India’s official entry to the 2017 Academy Awards. Whenever we talk about “Indian cinema”, our minds are almost always overshadowed by the glamorous cinematic mammoth that is Bollywood. It is forgotten how regional cinema caters to the audience’s more immediate cultures, given that we are a nation with so many voices and languages co-existing. Only of late have regional films begun to receive due recognition. Even big production houses today are backing regional films. Take for instance the 2013 Tamil film Pardesi backed by Kashyap’s Phantom Films, or the 2015 Telegu film Baahubali backed by Dharma Productions. Baahubali in fact went on to become one of the highest grossing films of 2015, no small feat for a non-Hindi film, and also won the National Award for Best Feature Film. If we take a closer look at National Award winners for Best Feature Films over the last decade, except for Paan Singh Tomar (2012) and Ship of Theseus (2013), it has mostly been bagged by non-Hindi films. Equally constant have been the official entries to Oscars over the last five years: Abu, Son of Adam (Malayalam) in 2011, The Good Road (Gujarati) in 2013, Court (Marathi) in 2014, Visaranai in 2016. As for the Bengali film industry, Kaushik Ganguly’s recent directorial Cinemawala earned him a UNESCO Fellini Award this year, a first for any Indian filmmaker. Indeed, there has never been a better time to be a fan of Indian cinema. And, 2017 seems full of promise. There’s Marathi director Ganjendra Ahire’s cutting edge film The Silence which deals with three women’s struggle to overcome fear surrounding rape and child abuse. Then there’s another Marathi-language drama from Killa director Avinash Arun titled Boomerang. One of the most awaited theatrical releases would perhaps be debutante M.S. Prakash Babu’s 90-minute existential road movie Attihannu mattu kanaja ( Fig Fruit and the Wasps). A joint venture of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and Bayalu Chitra, it is being talked about for its filming which has been done using a 5D camera. — Srija Naskar