Marathi filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane has won big at the Venice Film Festival. Chaitanya’s The Disciple, has won two prestigious awards – International Critics’ Prize and the Best Screenplay Award. While people barely know about it, this is the news that deserves to make headlines.
The movie narrates the story of a Hindustani classical singer in Mumbai and his life experiences. The movie has Afonso Cuaron as the executive producer, who has also been the director to films like Gravity and Roma.
Chaitanya’s The Disciple, a Marathi feature film, was awarded at the closing ceremony of the Venice Film Festival, 2020. The film’s win is indeed an honour as this was the first Indian film to compete at the festival post Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding. The filmmaker’s 2014 film, Court, was yet another film that won a lot of applause. In fact, it also made it as the official entry to the 88th Oscars.
He kickstarted his career 16 years ago with a serial called Kya Higa Nimmo Ka. Later, he went on to work on films with Vivek Gomber and that’s when things changed. He gives due credits to Vivek for having written and directed a film like Court.
Eventually, he went on to meet Mexican filmmaker Cuaron and got him on board as the executive producer. Chaitanya’s The Disciple took over 4 years to finally culminate into a full-fledged feature film. His film has won him praise from the likes of Anurag Kashyap, Swara Bhasker, and a few others.
Check out some Tweets here:
https://twitter.com/la_Biennale/status/1304840965274972160
Proud moment for Indian Cinema! Congratulations #ChaintanyaTamhane and team #TheDisciple 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳 https://t.co/Kx1z1iK2fp
— Swara Bhasker (@ReallySwara) September 13, 2020
Chaitanya’s The Disciple will now premiere virtually at the Toronto Film Festival. And that, means another feature to his already illustrious cap. While the filmmaker continues to do well for himself, we need to do good to films too.
Disguised as what we call entertainment reporting, we are missing out on telling things that must be, – stories that need to be told about films that need to be watched.
