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In Suketu Mehta’s breakout guide, Maximum City printed in 2004, the Mumbai-born writer, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, spends a number of pages raving about Bollywood, with one explicit dialog with a movie director standing out.
The director is Vidhu Vinod Chopra, the one filmmaker in Bollywood at present to have received an Oscar nomination. That was in 1979 when Chopra, 26 years previous and contemporary out of Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, received the nod within the Best Documentary Short class on the 51st Academy Awards for An Encounter with Faces, a couple of group of youngsters in an orphanage.
It was one of many earliest Oscar nominations for an Indian in any class. Before Chopra, the twelfth Fail (2023), Munna Bhai MBBS (2003) and 3 Idiots (2009) director, India had three Oscar nominations, two of them within the documentary or brief class.
Produced by the Films Division below the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting earlier than it merged with National Film Development Corporation final yr, Chopra-directed An Encounter with Faces misplaced to an American movie, The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, the story of the primary human-powered plane.
Nearly twenty years earlier than Chopra’s nomination, one other younger Mumbai-born filmmaker received a nomination within the Academy Awards brief class — Ismail Merchant for his debut movie, The Creation of Women in 1961.
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The documentary brief nomination for An Encounter with Faces was preceded by the nomination for yet one more Mumbai-born filmmaker, Fali Billimoria’s The House That Ananda Built, additionally produced by Films Division, within the documentary brief class in 1969. Both Merchant and Billimoria, identified for his famously filmed interview with Jawaharlal Nehru in 1958 to disprove American allegations of the then Indian prime minister being a Communist, are not any extra.
More documentaries from and on India have earned Academy nominations than Indian function movies (together with Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, 1957, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!, 1988, and Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan, 2001; Pan Nalin’s The Last Film Show/Chhello Show, 2023 was shortlisted).
Decades later, one other outstanding run for the ‘India story’ on the Academy Awards’ documentary class lately has returned the worldwide deal with Indian documentary filmmaking. At the Oscars final yr, two Indian movies have been vying for the honours within the two documentary classes of the Oscars with one happening to win, a primary for an Indian filmmaker.
Delhi-based Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes was a nominee within the Best Documentary Feature class and Ooty-based Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers within the Best Documentary Short class.
Gonsalves went on to win whereas Sen misplaced to a fellow former pupil on the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, Shane Boris, who was one of many producers of Navalny, which received the Best Documentary Feature award final yr.
This yr, a movie shot in India and directed by an Indian-Canadian filmmaker will vie for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. To Kill a Tiger by Toronto-based Nisha Pahuja is likely one of the 5 nominees within the class.
The Delhi-born Pahuja, identified for her earlier documentary, The World Before Her (2012) about two younger Indian girls pursuing totally different ambitions, shot her new documentary in Jharkhand, an almost decade-long undertaking in regards to the gang rape of a 14-year-old woman.
Director of the brief movie, Indian Bus Outrage, in 2014 on the 2012 gang rape of a pupil in Delhi, Pahuja’s To Kill a Tiger is the lone India-related nominee this yr on the Academy Awards to be offered on March 11.
An Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, the Toronto-based Pahuja’s new movie is the primary documentary produced by the National Film Board of Canada to win an Oscar nomination within the final 4 a long time. Another Indian-born filmmaker to have received an Oscar nomination for a movie produced by National Film Board of Canada was Ishu Patel for The Bead Game within the Best Animation Short Film class in 1978.
After the nominations of Merchant, Billimoria and Chopra, an Indian movie returned to the record of Oscar nominees for documentary or brief in 2005 when Little Terrorist by Ashwin Kumar (Road to Ladakh and Inshallah, Kashmir) obtained the nomination within the Best Live Action Short class.
In latest years, Indian documentaries have been more and more receiving the eye of Oscar voters. In 2022, Writing With Fire by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh on the story of Khabar Lahariya, the Dalit girls reporters-led newspaper in Uttar Pradesh, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature, which they misplaced to Summer of Soul, the story of the music competition in Harlem in 1969 known as the ‘Black Woodstock’.
Two years earlier, two South Asian-origin filmmakers — the US-based Smriti Mundhra and Canada-based Sami Khan — have been nominated within the Best Documentary Short class for St. Louis Superman on the story of Black activist and politician Bruce Franks Jr. It was picked up by MTV Documentary Films chief Sheila Nevins, who received one other nomination for a brief documentary, The ABCs of Book Banning, on the Oscars this yr.
Two brief documentaries shot in India — Smile Pinki by American director Megan Mylan and Iranian-American filmmaker Rayka Zehtabch’s Period: End of Sentence — have received the Oscar for Best Documentary Short up to now. Smile Pinki, about corrective surgical procedure serving to kids born with cleft lips in India, received the Oscar in 2009 and Period: End of Sentence, on the taboo surrounding menstruation in rural India, received in 2019.
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