A film by a Pune-based director on the quotidian struggles of four sisters set against the unforgiving backdrop of farmer suicides in Maharashtra’s rain-shadow region of Vidarbha has made it to the contention list of the 87th Academy Awards, popularly called the Oscars.
' Kapus Kondyachi Goshta' (The Unending Story), directed by Mrunalini Bhosale, made it to the contention list in the ‘Best Picture’ category after the American Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences recently disclosed the final long-list of 323 films eligible for awards.
“It is a most topical film, detailing the social ostracism and poverty rife among Vidarbha’s cotton growers,” says Ms. Bhosale, who initially never thought of entering her film for the Oscars despite tremendous regional and international acclamation.
The film, which derives from a real-life story, charts the travails and triumphs of the sisters cruelly orphaned by the suicide of their parents, both cotton farmers steeped in debt. By focusing on the odyssey of the eldest sister Jyoti, the film fascinatingly delineates the problems and complexities of feminism in the rural hinterland of third world countries.
“The thought of recognition in the form of awards was nowhere in my mind when I began working on this film. I just hoped to tell a sensitive story in a sensitive manner so that better-off people would prick their ears and take note of just how difficult life is in rural India,” she recounts.
The film was based on the lives of four sisters residing in a small village near Nagpur. It appeared in the Marathi agricultural magazine Baliraja, which is owned by the Bhosales.
A specialist of the ‘agricultural documentary’, Ms. Bhosale has created and directed close to 50 films in a variety of regional languages as well as English – all focusing on the pitfalls and triumphs of men and women who work the soil.
It has been an unusually rich year for Marathi cinema and debutante directors in terms of international recognition.
'Fandry', a painful and sensitive exploration of an unrequited love affair between a Dalit boy and a girl from a higher caste, was instantly showered with accolades throughout the country and across the world. While it was long-listed for the Golden Globe awards along with Liar’s Dice (India’s official entry in the ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ category to the Oscars), both failed to make the short-list.
