Chaitanya Tamhane
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
A profile
India Today, April 20, 2015
Suhani Singh
Not everyone wins 18 global and national awards for their debut film. Chaitanya Tamhane, 28, has taken the festival circuit by storm with his gripping Court
Debutant director Chaitanya Tamhane, 28, wrote Court, winner of the National Award for Best Feature Film, during a "dark phase" of his life. Born and brought up in Mumbai, Tamhane, a graduate in English literature from Mithibai College, didn't want to do a nine-to-five job. By 20, he had worked at Balaji Telefilms as part of the writing team of the short-lived Star One TV show Kyaa Hoga Nimmo Kaa, and later as a programmer for UTV Palador. That was his last salaried job. Thereafter, he made a documentary, Four Step Plan (2006), on plagiarism in Bollywood, then a short film, Six Strands (2010), and also wrote and directed a play, Grey Elephants in Denmark. But none of them paid off. "There was pressure from the family. I was told you need to pay your own bills now. I was very bitter, upset and helpless," he said over the phone from New York, where he was the only Indian filmmaker at the New Directors/New Films festival held at the Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art.
The film buff who spent most of his earnings on buying world cinema DVDs took to directing since did he not want to assist a filmmaker. He had an idea. In his actor-friend Vivek Gomber he found a producer willing to invest in his dream. Three years later, Court is an idea that has travelled far andwide-screened at over 45 film festivals-and won 18 accolades, including the Lion of the Future Award and Best Film Award in the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival. The film releases in India on April 17.
Drawing inspiration from multiple sources such as the tradition of lok shahirs (folk singers) of Maharashtra, protest singer-activists such as Gummadi Vittal Rao aka Gaddar, and the case of Jiten Marandi-a tribal activist of Jharkhand who was wrongly accused and sentenced to death in the 2007 Chilkari massacre case and eventually released-Tamhane took a year to write a fine multilingual screenplay in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English. It follows the trial of a Dalit writer-singer-activist Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar) who is arrested by the police after his song is blamed for inciting a manhole cleaner to commit suicide. But that's just a start of the drama, which apart from offering a melodrama-free and wry view of India's judicial process, goes beyond the courtroom to look at the quotidian lives of the judge (Pradeep Joshi) and the two lawyers-defence lawyer Vinay Vora (Gomber) and public prosecutor Nutan (Geetanjali Kulkarni).
It's one of Tamhane's many accomplishments that he makes the film's key characters very relatable. The disparity in the lifestyles of the lawyers and the judge becomes Tamhane's way to depict the diverse socio-economic-cultural fabric of the country's financial capital. "I strove very hard to not make them caricatures," says Tamhane, and show how "people are full of complexities and contradictions". The idea to capture the three central characters beyond their professional life, says Tamhane, emerged from interviews with many academics, activists and lawyers.
Apart from the measured performances by each of the actors, one of the best aspects of Tamhane's debut is its realism and attention to detail. Tamhane spent a lot of time observing proceedings in the Sessions Court at Dindoshi in Goregaon East and the Metropolitan Magistrate Court in Andheri East to research on the film. "You can't become a slave to reality," he says. "I also went with intuition and imagination." His observations and world view are evident in the convincing production design and even the movements and actions of people in the background. Tamhane credits this to his casting director, Satchit Puranik, who spent eight months looking for people to fit the many roles.
Apart from Kulkarni and Gomber, both theatre actors, Court's cast is mostly amateur. Their lack of experience only adds authenticity to the film. For the role of Kamble, Puranik approached Sathidar, a Nagpur-based poet, singer, activist and editor of Marathi magazine Vidrohi, who in real life too had come under police scrutiny. To fill the courtroom, Puranik's team distributed flyers in Virar, Churchgate and CST stations encouraging people who "hadn't acted professionally" to act for them. The jaded, credible faces in the film's backdrop are thanks to Tamhane's demanding shooting style. "We took so many retakes, people actually got bored and that showed on screen," he adds with a grin.
For audiences that are accustomed to Bollywood legal dramas where the court is a stage ripe for dramatic action, Court comes across as detached. There is mockery of justice but the approach is more restrained. Tamhane's fly-on-the-wall style of direction makes the courtroom experience better and literally leaves viewers frustrated with the slow judicial process. He expects the audiences to derive their own conclusions.
With his first feature film winning critical acclaim and many awards, all eyes will be on what Tamhane has to offer next. A trained magician, Tamhane is currently busy developing a sitcom for the Web and also writing a script for a new film. On his newfound status as one of India's young and talented filmmakers, Tamhane says he is unfazed by the expectations and the pressure, adding that he is not the easiest guy to work with. "It is very hard for people to keep up with the work ethic and commitment I expect." If it results in a film like Court, the effort is worth it.
Awards
Chandrima Banerjee, September 13, 2020: The Times of India
[In 2014], Tamhana, 26 then, had won two Fiprescis — one at the Buenos Aires festival and another at the Vienna festival — for his first feature, ‘Court’, a Marathilanguage film about an activist accused of abetting a manual scavenger’s suicide with a song. After gathering critical acclaim, the film had come home to a National Award.
In 2020, with the international critics’ award at the Venice Film Festival, the world’s oldest, Chaitanya Tamhane repeated the feat with ‘The Disciple’
‘The Disciple’ spans three decades of an Indian classical music practitioner’s journey, rooted in traditions laid out by his guru, his mentors and his father. It is an immersive telling,” Tamhane told TOI. The film opened to critical acclaim and rave reviews.
