Looking back upon 2018, ‘Dhadak’ had gained much more recognition as the remake of the 2016 Marathi film, ‘Sairat’, than ‘Sairat’ itself. A very few number of people knew about the movie until Bollywood came up with a glamourized version. The result was, by the end of 2018 a majority of Indian audiences have watched ‘Dhadak’, a poor remake of a critically acclaimed story. ‘Dhadak’, lacked the rawness of ‘Sairat’, which never got its own recognition.
2020, might have been a bad year for many but for Indian regional cinema, it was the year when it got the exposure it deserved. With the advent of this lockdown, a lot of Indian audiences overcame the ‘one-inch tall barrier of subtitles’, Bong Jon Hoo quoted, as they were introduced to some great films from all over India.
Films like Aamis (Assamese), Super Deluxe (Tamil), Nirbaak (Bengali), 96 (Tamil) and so many more are finally getting the recognition they deserved.
Yash Patwari, a 27-year-old entrepreneur says how the OTT platforms have opened up a whole new world of cinema for him, “For example, I watched a Malayalam film, ‘Uyare’ on Netflix about an acid attack survivor. We can no longer call it regional.”
One good thing about the lockdown would be the fact that a film like ‘Judwaa 2’ (released on Amazon Prime) is finally getting rejected by the Indian audiences, which might not have been the case had it released in theatres, while a Tamil film like, ‘Paava Kadhaigal’ is being welcomed by the same audiences with wide arms.
Shabana Azmi who is India’s most accomplished living actress says, “The lockdown has given me and my husband (writer Javed Akhtar) a chance to see some of the finest works from Indian cinema in Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam.”
Text by: Sreyoshi Sil, IBTN9
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