53rd national film awards,2005,india
finally the award list has come out.
for your information and discussion ….
best feature film-kalpurush,dir.- budhdeo dasgupta
first film of a director-parineeta,dir-pradeep sarkar
popular film-rang de basanti,dir-rakesh mehra
children film-blue umbrella.dir-vishal bhardwaj
direction-rahul dholkia for parzania
best actor-amitabh bachchan-black
best actress-sarika-parzania
best supporting actor-naseeruddin shah-iqbal
best supporting actress-urvashi-achhuvinte amma for
best child-sai kumar-bommalata
male play back singer-naresh iyer-rang de basanti,ru-ba-ru
female playback singer-shreya ghoshal-paheli,apne ansoo peene ke liye
best cinamatography-madhu ambat-sringaram
best screenplay-apharan-prakash jha,sridhar raghvan,manoj tyagi
best audiography-nakul kamte-rang de basanti
best editing-p s bharathi-rang de basanti
art direction-c b more-taj mahal
best costume-anna singh(tajmahal) and savyasachi mukherji(black)
music direction-lalgudi jayraman-sringaram
spaecial jury award-anupam kher-maine gandhi ko nahi mara
best chorography-saroj khan-sringaram
these are some of the awards…
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Before we dissect the award winners, could somebody please elaborate on the criteria for awards please? Unless there is transparency (and more importantly rigorous research) such awards will be sites for cultural politics! As a film scholar, I would be glad if somebody could point me in the right direction in terms of
a) whether there is documentation (which is shared)
b) is this available for scrutiny
For Once I thought BLACK FRIDAY will get the award(golden lotus)…alas we areliving in the jungle of lotus eaters which we often forget.
Regards,
Interesting. Based on my online research, one of the awards is a little different. I wish the National Awards had their own website where they listed them.
Best Choreography was not won by Saroj Khan. It is a different choreographer named Saroj who choreographed for Sringaram.
Best Cinematography based on what I read was won by Paramvir Singh for “Parsiwada, Tarapore Present Day”
Some other awards were:
Nargis Dutt Award for the Best Feature Film on National Integration:
Kishore: You have raised very pertinent points. The National Awards Jury members do take notes on their own during the discussions, though not all of them take them. Ideally, there should be a Jury secretary who should be rigorously taking down the notes during the discussions. It does not happen, unfortunately. I hope the DFF takes note of this lacunae, more so as the National Awards are often mired in controversies.
The Right to Information Act can be used to access such notes, but before that there has to be a system.
But first I would like to know whether the jury deliberations anywhere in the world are accessible to others. I am not sure it happens, though I would be glad to stand corrected on this.
As I have the experience of serving in one of the National Awards juries (the jury for the Best Writing on Cinema at the 52nd National Awards, my fellow members were Rauf Ahmed who was chairman and Shoma Chatterjee from Kolkata), I can emphatically say that there was widespread discussion among us on each of the entries, in both critic and book sections.
However, that is not to say that that happens all the time with all the juries (to explain that I will write a separate piece on this forum on the peculiarities of the court case filed by one of the jury members against the awards of 2005). There are a lot of informal discussions among the members, and many a time some of the peculiarly-named categories of national awards get filled up by a ‘give-and-take’ formula among the jury members who are usually selected from all over the country (’give this award to a particular language film and take that award for another language film’).
Quite often, deserving films miss out from winning because of this, which is somewhat akin to what you call “cultural politics”.
But on the final count, isn’t jury decision going to be subjective? Show the same films to one jury and then to another, and I am sure they would come up with different lists of winners, barring maybe a few exceptional similarities.
But I can say from my experience that though the awards are given by the government, the jury works independently of it, and there is no intervention from the government. But then, the government of the day always plants one or two jury members, under the garb of them representing segments like women activists, social workers, et al. (my piece on the court case will have inputs on this), who might try to influence, but again, finally it depends of the majority view and the cinematic knowledge of the chairman.
But my personal view is that no award selection can have unanimous stamp of approval from everyone as films, like any other art form, is purely subjective in terms of appreciation. – Can anyone justify the fact that Bengali thespian Soumitra Chatterjee, who acted in most of the Ray films, has never won a national award? He was once given the best supporting actor award, but he rejected it saying the character he played was the protagonist of the film (I forget which one), and so the selection was not right.
Cubicle Bound Misfit: I think Black Friday will be able to enter the National Awards for 2006 whenever that happens, because it is a film censored in 2006 (thus having the label of being a film made in 2006, as per the criteria used by Directorate of Film Festivals to decide on the year of making of a film). Am I right, Anurag?
Vijay: You are wrong on Saroj Khan count. It is the same Saroj Khan who has won the award for Sringaram. Incidentally, it was her first work in an offbeat film.
The whole awards list is available in the Government of India’s Press Information Bureau website: both in PDF format (there is link on the left hand column) and web display format (at the centre, where there is a link “more releases” – when you click it, it will take you to a page of ministry-wise press releases. you will get it under Ministry of I&B). The website is pib.nic.in
Black Friday would be a 2007 entry or 2006 .. i don’t know
Thanks Utpal. So we concede that ontologically awards, like the film canon, are arbitrary. This should be made clear to the wider public. The awards are not about “excellence”, but about power-relations and the struggle for hegemony of one idea over the other — which explains what happened with the national awards under the BJP regime. It should be the responsibility of the film critic to distance oneself from awards. It is a clear appropriation of the writer by the structures of power (and worryingly the willingness to be appropriated).
The argument about similarities in practices around the world does not dilute the critique of the awards as I see as a deflection of the concerns I have raised.
Yes, a group of people (worthy or otherwise) can sit around the table and decide what is accepted into the canon. But this approach is based on the assumption that the opinion of a few people — and not transparent arguments with clear supporting evidence and openness for peer-review — are enough to benchmark practices. I am not sure this is the best approach for an egalitarian society, especially since the awards use public funding and are supposedly in the name of the citizens of the country.
Since you have been on the jury (and have access to the powers that be), could you help obtain notes (if available) or at least put me on to all the members of the panel so I can interview them and present my findings.
Best Film Critic: Baradwaj Rangan.
Cool!!! His reviews are AWESOME. For once I totally agree with the jury.
Baradwaj Rangan is GOD!
what about Lal for thanmatra..raj kiran for Thavamai thavamirundu????????????????????? wtf!
im very happy n proud that IQBAL get award………my heartly congrats to NAGESH KOKNOOR’S & Im very happy that im part of this film………..3 cheers to IQBAL.
LOTS OF WISH TO OTHER AWARDS WINNER
Congrats Bhavani for creating such superb charactor in black….. i truly appricate & expecting more from you…….. congrats Amitji….
Like every year, this year too the awards went to the most undeserving ones.
The real GOD of hamming and mannerism (of moving hands) getting the award for BLACK doesn’t fit me. Everyone is fond of hamming. How come SRK (Paheli), Aamir (RDB), Kay Kay (Hazaron.. and Sakar), even Shreyas (Iqbal) go unnoticed?
BLACK: Are the awrads really given to films which are ‘unique’ & ‘original’ and have shown ‘cinematic brilliance’? I really don’t understand the cinematic beauty of Black. Original? Duh! Bhavani! No offence meant!
Where did the following films go? HAZARON…., PAHELI (truly magnificent) etc.
Everyone in this country is biased. Wait, next sheer cinematic beauty and performance would be GURU, Ab jr. etc. Misery!
Anurag! Man, don’t be disappointed if BF doesn’t make it and probably won’t. Isn’t PFC the biggest award? We’re with you.
funny dat they forgot south indian films & performance which are much better…:(
Thanx for the list Ajayji.
Well, Kishore, your comments are somewhat in the extreme. I would tend to believe it is somewhere in between. Life never is perfect, though we would like it to be.
If undeservingly films get awarded, truly deserving ones too have got awards (I am not talking particularly about this year, but in general about the National Awards over the years). And I also don’t agree that all the awards are decided through “power relations” and “struggle for hegemony of one idea about another” (though theoretically it is true as when a film wins an award, it is an idea that is being recognised, over many other deserving and undeserving ideas).
As I said, it depends of the integrity and knowledge (again a subjective issue) of the jury (or, to put it in a more focused way – majority of the jury). But if there has to be awards, there has to be a selection process, right? It is not a 100m race that one can calculate who has done better by how many thousandths of a minute. What can be an effective way of deciding such awards – I would be appreciative if people give their ideas of it on this forum.
Even in an egalitarian society, can there ever be any decision that is agreeable by everyone – or can there be any system that everyone in India participates in choosing the winners of national film awards (or the Sahitya Akademi, Sangeet Natak Akademi and so many other awards, which are decided by juries comprising people who have some idea about those fields)?
For example, Kaalpurush or Parzania or Baradwaj Rangan (best critic) are truly deserving, as many others are, while I myself am unhappy about a lot of awards.
And no, I don’t agree that only during BJP’s rule the awards got mired in controversies. All political establishments, including Congress, tend to exercise their control over creative faculties of people. Mind you, the Censor Board took years to clear Parzania even after Congress came to power at the Centre, and documentary filmmakers like Anand Patwardhan face problems whichever dispensation is in power.
I strongly believe that if one has even an iota of belief that s/he can contribute to changing things for the better, s/he can very well work within the system and try to change it – however moronic that might sound in today’s times.
I rest my case. And yes, I will try and send you the names and contacts of some jury members over the years so that you can develop this idea further.
SK: My choice for the Best Actor would have been either Mohanlal for Thanmatra or Anupam Kher for Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara (I am saying this on the basis of the awards list, that gives an indication of the films that entered for the awards – there could be more choices if and when I get to see the whole list of films entered in the awards)
Kishore: Just thought would make one theoretical point to add to what you are saying -
How does one say the best film or the best director award winner is a truly deserving winner for the being the best in those categories among the films made during that particular year, because they are decided from only among the films that are entered for the competition by their producers / directors. There may be even better films which for some reason were not entered.
I will give a specific example of this. Irrfan Khan, before he became the big name that he is today, had acted in a film called Haasil, by Tigmanshu Dhulia. It was a powerhouse performance, and I feel it is one of his best till date, on par with Warrior or Namesake. But the film’s producer never entered the film for the National Awards. So, is the actor who got the best actor award that year is better or worse than Irrfan?
I am sure Dr.Alois Alzheimer must be crying in disdain over the news of Mr.Amitabh Bachchan winning the National award for Black. How can the jury be so myopic, all said and done, it was bad acting, specially the Alzheimer part. Iam quite certain Mr. Bachchan or Mr.Bhansali had not seen a single Alzheimer patient while making this movie, otherwise they would have known that as the disease progresses to the late stage, patients are not able to perform even simple tasks independently and require constant supervision. They become incontinent of bladder and then incontinent of bowel. They eventually lose the ability to even walk and eat without assistance and here
Yes, I agree with Utpal. Mohan Lal should have been awarded the Best Actor Award for Tanmatra. Not Black. Incidentally, the Malayalam actor acted as an Alzhiemer’s patient in Tanmatra. This is the second time, if not more, Lal loses a deserving National Award. Man of the jury members were keen on awarding Lal the Bharat. B..ut…
actors like Kamal,lal,mammooty,nedumudi venu,kay kay menon,irfan khan,etc can forget the national awards…after all it awards saif for hum tum and now big b for black..~X(~X(
Yes SK, True. Saif’s award was shocking. I could not believe when I heard the news. Anyway, such is the state of our film affairs.
hey guys, why not Sudhir Mishra tells us something on this? after all, he was the jury chairman when saif was made best actor for hum tum.
Prashanth: for you -
Sudhir Mishra’s version has already been published 2 years ago. have a look
http://in.rediff.com/movies/2005/jul/14sudhir.htm
Utpal – Thanks for the clarification. I stand corrected on both my initial “corrections”. The website link you provided had the PDF file with the official winner list.
@CC,i wondered while watching Black about such poor portrayal of Alzheimer patient..It was so melodramatic like rest of the movie(imo,Sanjay Leela Bhansali is seeped into melodrama)..
@Utpal Borpujari:Have not seen Mohanlal’s Thanmatra but if ever there had to be a choice between AB of Black and AK of Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara, i would definitely go for AK.
@Kumar Budha: Howsoever transparent the selection process may be,Utpal Borpujari has a valid point that it will still keep some elements disgruntled..Only thing that can be acceptable is a selection of jury members with high credentials and having integrity..Rest has to be left to them and then their decision trusted..Trust is the cementing factor.
CC, Sanjay Bhansali and I visited hospitals and have watched innumerable tapes of patients suffering from Alzheimer’s, apart from speaking with doctors etc. I have seen Alzheimer’s in close quarters within my family. And Amitabh Bachchan’s mother, I believe, is in an advanced state of Alzhiemer’s. So, you’re wrong, both the director and actor and less importantly the writer have some idea of the illness, maybe fractional in your opinion, but nowhere close to ‘never seen a patient in their lives’.
To justify him being tied to a bed, in several cases, patients just run away/ wander off due to their disturbed states of mind, and therefore need to be confined. I have seen an old gentleman being tied to a cupboard by his helpless family because he was getting violent on account of his dementia.
Everyone is entitled to opinions about whether or not the actor is deserving of the honor. But assuming his incompetence is rather presumptuous. A mandatory amount of research is essential to any film, especially a film of this nature. I shall not bore you with the copious files on disabilities and diseases that most crew members were given to study. And considering that the actor in question spent six months before we rolled, in learning sign language, he certainly wouldn’t venture into depicting an illness so grave without preparation, wouldn’t it be safe to assume?
As regards the incontinence and loss of control over other bodily functions, if the film was meant to chronicle Alzhiemer’s and dementia, I’m sure the director would’ve found place for all of them.
Citizen Kane, no offense taken. Like I said, it’s your opinion. The usage of hands was essential and deliberate. Deaf and blind children rely on the broadness of your gestures to understand the emphasis of whatever’s being ’said’ to them. And the teachers at Helen Keller’s Institute in Byculla have an enchanting way with their hands, moving them, slashing the air with them, almost like dancers. Years of teaching these students have made these gestures second nature to them.
Dsantosh, thank you.
Infact even I wanted to write a film based on Alzhiemer’s and around the time Black released I was doing my part of research and one thing which made me happy after watching Black, other than Amitabh’s performance, was the fact that they had done a a good amount of research and got the facts right.
The problems I have with Black are more with the way shots are composed and the strange and unknown time zone it is set in.
There is one question I have which Bhavani you might be able to answer.
In the second last scene of the film (if you dont count the final shot of people lifting candles up in the air in front of the church) when Michelle graduates, she gives a speech about how Black is the color of victory and its relevence in other ways.
In the next scene, she goes to debraj who is in the hospital, she teaches him the first word- water. they look out of the window and the cam pulls up slightly. everything in the frame is completely white and i believe its done deliberately. the fountain, the wall, even debraj’s dress is white. what is its significance?
Why such a sudden tonal shift? There has to be some logic behind it, does the contrast between the speech and the color of the frame has any relevance?
I didnt get it![-(
As Bhavani said, the portrayal of an alzhiemer patient may be well-researched but the film as a whole felt very unreal…it was more a spectacle, something one couldn’t relate to..as if it was hapenning in a fairytale place…spotless white clothes and sheets etc….
I have not seen Black, so can’t comment on the views that it is an undeserving national award. However I can comment that Vijaynath Deenanath Chavan character for which AB previously won an award was rather corny. I am sure that there were many sureshot winners from Bengali and Malayalam cinema that year. One heartening thing to note that different film makers have handled the subject of Alzheimers and loss of sanity in older characters in completely different manner (SLB – Black, Thanmatra and the superb Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara) without a fear that their subject was so similar to a well known movie with the same theme. This shows that irrespective of their cinematic style that comes in for controversial review from different quarters, their conviction to tell the story stands out and for this reason all of them deserve applause.
This is not the first time that undeserving candidates ahve been given the award. I remember way back in 80’s Rekha got the award for best actress for Umrao Jaan whereas Jeniffer who was outsatnding in 36 Chowringhee Lane did not. Infact we must analyse the background of the panel members who decide on these awards whether they are at all capable enough to justify their selection.
Bhawani, thanks!
Well I understand the movements of hands as per your explanation. But the performance, as a whole, seemed an act of hamming and overacting. Especially, his voice and accentuation in certain parts. Just see the rediff link (Raja Sen’s analysis) I gave you in Unbelonging. That was great.
A personal message: Bhawani! I am yet to see ‘your’ “real” piece of writing as per the quality you have shown here on PFC. I have very, very huge expectations from you. Please don’t accept any Main Aisa Hi Hoon in future! You are just too good to write those films. It’s nothing if Black didn’t work for me. I know, you rock! Eagerly awaiting your next!
VPJ: The year Amitaabh won for Agneepath, the favourite was Sivakumar for Marupakkam.
Jaiganesh: Yes it is a coincidence that the same year saw there films in which Alzheimer’s Disease was under focus. One brilliant performance as an Alzheimer’s patient earlier was by Atul Kulkarni in the Marathi film Devrai.
Sanjeev Sharma: yes, the public knowledge of the background of each jury member is a must. And it has to be elaborate. Now when the juries are announced, a very brief account is given about the jury members – for eg. X is an actor from this industry, Y is a music director from that state, Z is a social worker from another place. While one would agree that you don’t have to elaborate if the jury members is a accomplished person (Say Sreekar Prasad or Madhu Ambat or Shyam Benegal or Sudhir Mishra or Anurag Kashyap….) the danger lies in categories like ’social worker’ because that is how politicians’ cronies are planted in the juries.
I strongly believe that a detailed bio data of each jury member should be placed in public domain, wheter it is for the national awards or Indian Panorama. If it is of a filmmaker, what has been his work, if it is a critic, what is his experience and background, if it is a ’social worker’ what work s/he has done and if s/he is associated with any organization /political party directly / indirectly. Ideally, a film jury should comprise people from only the film fraternity, just as the juries for Sahitya Akademi awards comprise only litterateurs.
But as it happens in national awards, people representating a cross section of the society (that is how the government describes it) is included so that views of all sections of society is represented. Mercifully, such non-film background jury members (of the social-worker variety) are just one or two in each jury of around 17-18 people. People from other creative fields like writers, artists are also included often in the jury.
Well, PFCians, would be interesting to know all your views on whether film jury should include people who do not have anything direct to do with cinema.
Utpal, in ‘Devrai’ Atul played a schizophrenic… and yes, absolutely brilliantly.
As much as he writes terrible films Farukh Dhondy can come up with original observations. He had this interesting anecdote to share about ‘Black’ & Amitabh Bachchan.
Farukh Dhondy joins a few of his angrez friends, who were curious about ‘this Bachchan dude’, over a screening of ‘Black’. Unable to take anymore of the trash a couple of them from the group left the film midway, assuring Dhondy who was keeping the remainder of the group company, that they would hang around at the Pub down the street. Having suffered enough through the film Dhondy joins his mates at the Pub.
“Ofcourse the film’s despicable. What did you make of Bachchan?”.
“Your bacon’s a ham!!!”
I find it incroyable that Bhavani Iyer is proud of her w r i t i n g ‘Black’.
As much as the ‘Bheja Fry’ team’s shameless about photo-play-copying ‘Le diner de Con’ & ‘Manorama Six Feet Under’ team’s tartful about peddling ‘Chinatown’ + it’s sequel ‘Two Jakes’. YES. The same film that Anurag Kashyap’s raving about & the rest of you guys parrotting.
If we don’t safeguard our cinematic gods now, we might have to celebrate them in their ‘Heritage’ avatar. As Ivan Illich has pertinently observed, ‘Modernity Cherishes all that it Destroys’.
You guys, here at PassionForCinema, shouldn’t participate in the destructive fucking around – with cinematic gods & gems. Not fuck, in this case, Robert Towne/Roman Polanski/Jack Nicholson. Unless you believe you’d cherish cinema more after it’s destruction than in it’s celebrative preservation.
thani… words like “you guys” “should” “shouldn’t” are best left out of PFC. firstly PFC isn’t a community or an inn where only likeminded people meet… it’s an OPEN platform for you and everyone else to come and discuss, express, speak out, be open and blunt – minus any fanatical, emotional, egotistical layers attached. Words on the internet have a strange way of being interpreted into a gazillion different ways. The only commonality I would like to see here is a HEALTHY debate or amicable environments for different opinions.
This does not mean I don’t agree with much of what you may have said but it doesn’t mean I agree with the way you said it either. Comments are moderated, posts aren’t. If you have something strong to blurt out… use Projekt iView and speak out.
Opinionated? Yes.
Opinionated-good? Opinionated-bad? The reader makes up his mind.
Ozzie, you seem to agree with what i ‘may have said’. A little differently, i definitely agree with what you have said – about PFC as an open platform, words on the internet, & healthy debate.
But mate, agreements and all, you don’t say anything about ‘Chinatown’. or even Dhondy’s interesting Bacon-Ham tale.
And about Anurag Kashyap, i’m talking about a film-maker i’m working with, & for. Irrespective of the working, I wouldn’t like to stumble upon a (Pakistani?) film called ‘Black Thursday’ which turns out to be a rehash of ‘Black Friday’. Nor would you, Ozzie. Like the stumblement.
But mate, CHINATOWN? Really.
p.s. Now, don’t edit me Ozzie. [thanikachalam@gmail.com]
that’s thani for you.. OZ:d:d
yep… just making sure thani doesn’t turn into thani-the message board flame thrower :d
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Ozzie, Please Brother:)
alrighty I’m in an o:-) mood today :>
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Yes Bhavani, Atul played a schizophrenic in Devrai. In fact, it struck me later that I had put it wrongly. Sincere apologies to Atul and to PFCians for that.
Sringaram Dance of love has come out the real winner!! 3 major awards – for music { lalgudi Jayaraman} Cinematography { madhu Ambat} and Choreography{ Saroj Khan} A absolutely beautiful film – to be realeased in Chennai in September{ 21st?}. First time director Sharada Ramanathan has done a marvelous job _ A must see!!!
Lakshmi, I think the music award for Sringaram was totally deserved. Such purity, such variety. And with excellence in mind.
Hey!…Man i just love your blog, keep the cool posts about national film awards,2005,india : PassionForCinema comin..holy Monday .
What’s a children film? A film for children or a film about children (or a child)?
I think ‘Blue Umbrella’ was for grown-ups rather than children.
And Iqbal: best film on social issues? doesn’t make much sense, does anyone know what were the other options/nominations in this category?
Hi there…Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts about names of lakshmi..what a nice Sunday .