The staff and three resident cats at Pune’s Prabhat theatre aren’t used to film-makers dropping by at 9am. So when Paresh Mokashi and brothers Umesh and Girish Kulkarni arrived to meet us there, the staff was intrigued and hurried up their morning chores—sweepers swept the dusty floors, the usher opened the tall, creaking doors of the 75-year-old auditorium, and the projectionist fed the pet felines biscuit and milk.
There couldn’t have been a more appropriate place to meet three new pioneers of Marathi cinema—shapers of what could be called the Marathi New Wave. Prabhat theatre has screened Marathi films since 1933, and some of the movie posters preserved in its office, from the 1940s until now, mirror the history of the industry—Sant Tukaram (1936), Pandu Hawaldar (1975) and Shwaas (2004) are just three of them.
Shape shifters: (from left) Umesh Kulkarni, Girish Kulkarni and Paresh Mokashi at Pune’s Prabhat theatre.
As people streamed in for the Monday morning show of
Gandha, a film by 32-year-old Pune-based director Sachin Kundalkar, this new wave became visibly believable. The Maharashtrian middle class, especially in Pune, is known for its love of theatre and cinema and from the looks of it, it was responding to the language of the young directors. As Kundalkar later told us, “Maharashtrians are a theatre-watching community and they value good actors the same way that some other audiences might value stars.”
Gandha has stars, though. Milind Soman and Sonali Kulkarni are the leads in this film about three fractured lives, seemingly disconnected from each other, but for the way the director uses the sense of smell in the three stories. Made famous by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu in Amores Perros nine years ago, the multiple-story narrative is, by now, a common device in cinema the world over, including Hindi cinema. But for audiences who have been used to watching slapstick and family dramas set in rural Maharashtra for more than two decades, it’s a path-breaking format.
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The audience, consisting largely of middle-aged couples and men of all ages, had filled up half the auditorium when Prabhat’s red velvet curtain billowed up. Before that, some people came up to congratulate Mokashi, who has been in the news for his debut feature film Harishchandrachi Factory, India’s official entry at the Oscars this year. Umesh Kulkarni, whose second film Vihir was screened earlier this month at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, is among the four young film-makers whose Marathi films are going to be screened at the Mumbai Film Festival, which began on Thursday (see box). “There is a new resurgence in Marathi cinema. Bright young film-makers are making socially significant films,” says acclaimed film-maker Shyam Benegal, who is also director of the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) that organizes the annual Mumbai Film Festival.