A few industry watchers had just judged a film called Shwaas (breath) for various awards, and had come away quite excited by it. In February this year, there was a buzz of expectation. They continued to hope for the best, buoyed by the occasional Amol Palekar, Jabbar Patel or Sumitra Bhave-Sunil Sukhtankar offering, and also by the emergence of younger filmmakers who were willing to have a stab at themes that were unconventional compared to the general run of Marathi cinema. Marathi film industry watchers, especially those who had been witness to the golden years of the 1950s and the 1960s, were wondering whether this situation would ever change. Of course, there were the odd bright spots, films that ensured that the Marathi film industry kept its head above the swirling waters, but they were mere drops in the sea of mediocrity. Atre's film version of a novel of the same title by Sane Guruji. Shantaram and his colleagues at Prabhat Films had unspooled the first reels of celluloid where Prabhat's Sant Tukaram was the first Indian film to win the Best Film award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival in 1937 and where, in 1954, at the first National Awards, the winner of the President's Gold Medal was Shyamchi Aai, Acharya P.K. This in a land where filmmakers like Dadasaheb Phalke, Baburao Painter, Balaji Pendharkar and V. They had no pretensions whatsoever to art and did not care two hoots for creativity.
Some melodramas, like Maherchi Saadi, and some comedies, aided by vulgarity and sexual innuendo - as in the case of Dada Kondke's films - made a killing at the box office. An outsider in its own linguistic heartland, and a suffering stepchild in comparison with the opulent, affluent Hindi cinema, it churned out mostly meaningless fare, which largely consisted of family melodramas and mindless comedies. IN the last couple of decades, Marathi cinema really seemed to have lost it. Shwaas, a Marathi film that has been nominated as India's entry for the Oscar awards, takes the film world by storm, winning a number of State and national awards.
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