For someone who has been successful with his unassuming style of filmmaking and realistic themes, Nagraj Manjule comes across as a romantic whose concepts of life and love are as surreal as popular tales of Indian yore can be.
“When you fall in love, you feel a certain magic. You start imagining the songs you would like to hear or the hero you would want to be like. This has happened to me and I am sure this happens to all,” he says.
The deep awareness of the psyche of an average Indian is probably what prompts Nagraj to cast little-known actors in his movies, which tell bitter truths of social life packaged in simple tales of love.
Grim reality
Post Fandry , which dealt with the theme of caste discrimination, he showed us the grim reality of honour killing in the film Sairat .
The movie was one that broke even his own expectations of a success, running to packed houses for months and getting even midnight screenings in theatres in remote locales of Maharashtra.
Finding connect
The reason for the success was his understanding of how to tell the story to a group of people who have always felt a disconnect with the larger-than-life screen heroes and heroines and yet felt the same emotions that are celebrated on screen.
“I wanted actors whom the masses I make film for could connect to. I wanted to express myself in a way my story would be heard and understood,” says Nagraj, who is part of the IFFK jury.
His Fandry is being shown as a jury film at the festival.
Sairat has been remade into several languages and its main cast of Rinku Rajguru and Akash Thosar have become overnight stars.
The movie has been picked up by Bollywood and remade with popular stars as the lead.
Unfazed
Yet Nagraj is unfazed by all this.
“I made my movie, said my thing. What people do to retell it is not much of what I would be bothered about. To me, it is a step ahead for Marathi cinema that one of its films has been remade into Hindi,” he says.
Even otherwise, Nagraj is quite untouched by the trends. Marathi cinema has seen changes over the decade with filmmakers portraying varied themes drawn from the long theatre culture of Maharashtra, and biopics and social issues.
But Nagraj would rather not look at it as a change. “We have been making movies. And we make movies even now. I see it as a journey. I see it as a part of life,” he says.
For someone who once used poetry to express himself, films are now the way he would like to give words to his thoughts.
All he takes care of is to see that those who hear him, understand and relate to those words.
