MARATHI FILM NOMINATED FOR AN OSCAR 2005
(8 November 2004)

'Shwaas' (breath), a Marathi film that has been nominated as India's entry for the Oscar awards, takes the film world by storm. Since its release in March, Shwaas has had a dream run, doing well at the box office, coming up trumps at various award nights, including the Maharashtra State Film Awards and then topping it all by bagging top honours at the National Awards, bringing the coveted Golden Lotus to Marathi cinema for the first time since 1954, as well as a shared award for Ashwin Chitale for best child artist.

In a land where filmmakers like Dadasaheb Phalke, Baburao Painter, Balaji Pendharkar and V. Shantaram and his colleagues at Prabhat Films had unspooled the first reels of celluloid; where Prabhat's 'Sant Tukaram' was the first Indian film to win the Best Film award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival in 1937; and where, in 1954, at the first National Awards, the winner of the President's Gold Medal was 'Shyamchi Aai', Acharya P.K. Atre's film version of a novel by Sane Guruji, the last couple of decades have seen Marathi Cinema in the doldrums.

Of course, there were the odd bright spots, films that ensured that the Marathi film industry kept its head above water, but they were mere drops in the sea of mediocrity. Marathi film industry watchers, especially those who had been witness to the golden years of the 1950s and the 1960s, were wondering whether this situation would ever change. They continued to hope for the best, buoyed by the occasional Amol Palekar, Jabbar Patel or Sumitra Bhave-Sunil Sukhtankar offering, and also by the emergence of younger filmmakers who were willing to have a stab at unconventional themes.

In February this year, there was a buzz of expectation. A few industry watchers had just judged a film called 'Shwaas' (breath) for various awards, and had come away quite excited by it. 'Shwaas' is a simple tale about a very young boy, barely seven or eight, who is diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare cancer of the eye. The surgeon guarantees that an operation will save his life and halt recurrence of the tumour. But the child will lose his sight.

The boy, Parshuram (Parshya), accompanied by his grandfather and his maternal uncle, comes to a hospital in Pune, a big city whose sights and sounds are alien to a soul bred in a picturesque Konkan village. The sympathetic surgeon and a young medical social worker help the grandfather to break to Parshya the tragic news of his approaching blindness.

For some reason, the surgery has to be postponed by a day. That afternoon, grandfather and grandson disappear from the hospital ward. A mad search follows. Confronted by an angry surgeon on their return, the grandfather states quite simply that he wanted to show Parshya the sights of the city for one last time.

'Shwaas' has excellent technical values - fluid camerawork (Sanjay Memane) and cutting-edge editing (Neeraj Voralia), outstanding performances by Ashwin Chitale as Parshya, Arun Nalawade as his grandfather and Sandeep Kulkarni as the surgeon. And above all, restrained handling of the script by director Sandeep Sawant, who had to get together with half-a-dozen others, such as actor Arun Nalawade, to raise the finance (some Rs.60 lakhs) to produce the film.

There were no compromises with the budget or the research of the medical milieu of the film. The Shwaas team eschewed short cuts and concentrated on doing the simple things well, creating a product that, despite its very Maharashtrian ethos, has universal appeal. In fact, it was this quality that moved the jury members who selected 'Shwaas' as India's entry to the 2005 Oscars. They felt that the film showcased the human element in a simple and sensitive manner.

CAST & CREW