Manipuri short The Tainted Mirror wins Grand Jury Award at Chalachitram National Film Festival

Manipuri filmmaker Romi Meitei has won the Grand Jury Award for Best Film for his short film The Tainted Mirror. The award was presented at the fifth edition of the Chalachitram National Film Festival. 

The drama was also awarded Best Short Fiction as well as the Film Critics Circle of India Special Mention Award for Best Child Artiste. The festival was held virtually from 10-15 August  This year, the Guwahati-based film festival has seen film entries in various languages including Manipuri, Assamese, English, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil.

The Tainted Mirror, also known as Motsillaba Mingsel, is a short film that portrays the effect of consumerism on one's value system. The tagline of the film is 'The vulnerability of the young minds in the battle of life of fair play and good health'. The film has won the Special Jury Award at the Manipur State Film Awards in 2020 and has been screened at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne. 

Other winners include Zachary Coffin for Best Director for his English film Deliverance; Amogh Deshpande won the Film Critics Circle of India Special Mention Award for Best Cinematography for Deliverance as well, and the Grand Jury Special Mention was awarded to the Marathi film Bhet.

This year marks Manipuri cinema's golden jubilee as the state's first feature-length film, Debkumar Bose's Matamgi Manipur, was released in April 1972. The festival commemorated this occasion with the screening of Aribam Syam Sharma’s Binodini: A Tribute and Imagi Ningthem (1981), Haobam Paban Kumar’s documentary The First Leap (2008), which sees the cast and crew of Matamgi Manipur get together after thirty years; and the documentary 50 Years of Manipuri Cinema: a Glimpse.