This year, a two hour 17 minutes film,
Udaan, which took 42 days to shoot and seven years to materialise, will be screened at the 63rd Cannes film festival. It is not only Vikramaditya Motwane’s directorial feature debut but also the first Indian film to be screened after a seven-year
‘jinxed’ hiatus at one of the world’s most celebrated film festivals. (The last film was Murali Nair’s
Arimpara the year he began writing his script.)
The festival starts on May 12 and goes on till May 23. Motwane’s film has been selected for the ‘Un Certain Regard’ — the second most important section of the festival that runs parallel to the prestigious Palme d’Or competition. “I sent the film not expecting much and was surprised when they selected Udaan,” he says. Motwane has been busy shuttling between the studios and back laying the finishing touches to his film.
“Udaan is a simple coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old boy who returns to his hometown, Jamshedpur, after spending eight years in a boarding school,” he says. “The film was kept in mind for an Indian audience.”
Even though Motwane wrote Udaan in late 2003, the script found no takers despite a few production houses haggling for it. “They had issues with the film. They felt the film lacked mass appeal,” he says.
Which is why there is a certain irony how filmmaker Anurag Kashyap came to produce the film. “When I was working with him on his film Paanch I showed him my script. After reading it he mildly remarked that one day he would help me make the film see the light of day.”
From a production assistant in the early 90s, when he helped his mother produce a teen talk show, to working as an assistant director for Sanjay Bhansali on the sets of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas to co-writing Kashyap’s Dev D, Motwane has come a long way.
But so have Indian films in general. “Mainstream cinema isn’t limited today to the neighbourhood single screen anymore. Everyone has a choice of what they want to watch. We (‘alternative filmmakers’) co-exist along with big commercial films on the same platform,” he says. “The only distinction is in the kind of stories we like to tell.”