Nila Madhab Panda started
his celluloid journey with the acclaimed ‘I am Kalam’. His subsequent work
focused equally on environmental as well as children's issues. He is excited to
steer another project that has a child as a central character. Explaining his
recurrent interest in such stories, he says, "India is a country with a 28.6%
children population, and yet we have very few films which are children centric
or talking about their issues". Debutant director Anuj Tyagi's Bishwa is
based on the life of a blind boy and how he emerges as a hero in a village near
the mesmerizing Chilika lake. The film has a highly-skilled cast and has Vinay
Pathak, Yagya Bhasin, Sharib Hashmi (Family Man fame) and
national-award-winning actress Usha Jadhav in pivotal roles.
Bishwa is shot entirely in
the mesmerizing beauty of Odisha, right before the lockdown started. Nila
Madhab Panda, who is born and brought up in Odisha has always shown his love
for Odisha through his films. But this will be a film entirely shot in Odisha.
Bishwa has featured the beauty of
Chilika lake, Bhubaneswar and Puri and
now the film is all set to open at the prestigious Buster Film Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark)
and the DYTIATO children's film festival, Ukraine.
Buster presents the greatest
selection in Denmark
of new exciting, innovative, challenging and entertaining films for children
and youth from all over the world. An elated Nila Madhab Panda says, “Cinema on
children's issues has always been the most important part of my career as I
started with I Am Kalam, then Jalpari and then Halkaa. ‘Bishwa’ is a tale of a
young boy who cannot see whereas the rest of the world can. His father believes
he is cursed with a disabled boy. But Bishwa is never ready to accept this
thought and gets agitated when people feel he is disabled. He is determined to
prove the idea of vision, that you may not have two eyes, does not mean you are
abnormal, and you still can do everything that others can do. He resolves the
villagers' biggest fear which others could not. You must come to the theatre to
see what it was that he resolved."
Talking about his debut film
opening at the Buster Film Festival, director Anuj Tyagi says “Bishwa is the
story of a little boy who is blind and yet he emerges as a hero. The subject is
very fresh and so are the locations we shot at. We are just lucky that we
finished the project a day before the lockdown which gave us a lot of time for
the post-production. It’s an honour for me and our whole team that the film is
selected for the Buster Film Festival and we are really looking forward to it”.
Nila Madhab Panda is a
unique filmmaker who has managed to create, in the short span of his ongoing
career, a narrative of dense and critical insight into contemporary India and the
psyche of its people. He brings such experience to bear upon his exploration of
contemporary, modern India,
giving birth to unique visual poetry that is, at once, charming and
thought-provoking.
Panda attained cult status
with his maiden feature film, I am Kalam in the year 2010. Winning 34
international awards along with a national award. His second feature film
Jalpari (Desert Mermaid), received the MIP Junior Award at Cannes. Later he directed Babloo
Happy Hai (Babloo is Happy), Kaun Kitney Paani Mein (In Troubled Water), Kadvi
Hawa (Dark Wind) received critical acclaim with a national award and then
Halkaa (Relief), has traveled to 32 international film festivals and won two
Grand Prix awards in the international film circuit.
His feature-length
documentary, God’s Own People (2016), narrated by Amitabh Bachchan. His recent feature film,
Yesterday’s Past (on sea-level rise), was part of Indian panorama, in IFFI Goa
and won a prestigious national award in 2020. For his achievements, he
received one of the highest civilian honors “Padma Shri” in 2016 and was
conferred with D.Litt. Honoris Causa in 2018.
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