MIFF 2022: National Competition jury was near-unanimous in selection of winners, says Sanjit Narwekar

Filmmaker and author Sanjit Narwekar, the head of the Mumbai International Film Festival's National Competition jury, said that he and his team of jurors didn’t have much trouble selecting the winning films.

“It’s one of the rare occasions where the jury was near-unanimous in all their suggestions,” he said. “Sadly, it was a boring kind of a jury. No mara maari [fights], no spicy tales to tell [laughs]. We had a lot of fun watching the films. It was a very good selection. The selection committee should be commended for making such a wonderful choice of films. We had to watch around 66 films. It came down to 30 hours of watching movies.”

Sri Lankan film critic Ashley Ratnavibhushana, director of Dhaka DocLab Tareq Ahmed, editor Subhash Sehgal and filmmaker Jayashree Bhattacharya were part of the jury.

Speaking about what the jurors look for in a film, Narwekar added, “The appeal of cinema is always ahl-e-dil. It first reaches your heart. It then reaches your mind. The overall content is the first thing that you see. The framing, shots, choreography, editing and sound; all come afterwards. The first thing is that the film should have an impact.”

Bhattacharya said that there were a lot of films on social issues. “This was expected,” she said. “Everyone presented them in different ways, which we really liked. There were films from senior filmmakers and youngsters. It was interesting to see how youngsters looked at various social issues.”

Sehgal added, “There was a lot of variety [in terms of subjects] – from child molestation, women’s issues, child marriage, water shortage, cutting down of jungles and coronavirus. There was no repetition. If there was a film on one subject, the other was on a different subject.” 

MIFF 2022 will conclude on 4 June.