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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