Diwa Shah’s Bahadur and Sumanth Bhat’s Mithya (pictured) were presented with the Prasad Labs and Qube Moviebuff Appreciation Awards in the Works-in-Progress (WIP) Lab of this year’s Film Bazaar (November 20-24).
Filmed in the Nepali, Kumaoni and Hindi languages, Bahadur is the story of a Nepali migrant labourer who gets stuck in India during a pandemic lockdown. Mithya, filmed in the Kannada language, revolves around an 11-year-old boy who is coming to terms with the sudden loss of his parents.
Prasad Labs and Qube jointly give awards to three projects participating in Film Bazaar – two from the WIP Lab and one from Film Bazaar Recommends (FBR) – with the aim of providing the films with a complete Digital Intermediate (DI) to DCP solution.
“Once again, experts and editors of the Film Lab were impressed by the quality of the selected WIP films and by the dedication to cinema on the part of the filmmakers and their team,” said the WIP Lab mentors in a joint statement.
“Creativity and diversity both in subject matters and styles were once again present in all the selected works. It’s always somehow heart-breaking to make choices and therefore we wish to express our compliments and best wishes to the five filmmakers and teams that we had the pleasure to work with.”
WIP Lab selections at Film Bazaar over the past three years include titles that have enjoyed wide festival success, such as Natesh Hegde’s Pedro, Shankar’s Fairies by Irfana Majumdar, Ajitpal Singh’s Fire In The Mountains, Nitin Lukose’s Paka – River Of Blood and Shivamma by Jai Shankar.
The joint Prasad & Qube award for a film from the FBR section, decided by the FBR jury, went to The Stranger (Agantuk) from Bangladesh’s Biplob Sarkar. The Bengali-language film revolves around a child living in a rural area of Bangladesh who is struggling with gender identity issues.
When handing out the award, the FBR jury stated: “The jury appreciates the simple and delicate coming-of-age tale that brings us close to different generations trying to escape from the denial of their identity.” The FBR jury included film scholars and programmers Paolo Bertolin, Elsa Charbit and Kiki Fung.