Anand Patwardhan

Anand Patwardhan, a generous, humane documentary filmmaker also known as the father of Indian documentaries, was born on 18th February 1950 in Mumbai to a family of a businessman. Graduating from Mumbai University in 1970, upholding an English Literature degree, and further went to America and studied sociology through the Scholarship. The Ongoing Vietnam war influenced him to show concern for social and political changes and brought him into the documentary filmmaking journey. His first acclaimed documentary was in 1971, "Waves of Revolution", based on the Bihar Movement repressing the government for the years of corruption and atrocities, by students and peasants of the area.

The ordinary filmmaker deploys the glamorous aspects into their films, unconsciously bringing enormous fascination and aspirations into the spectator's eyes. But, Anand Patwardhan, a post-colonial activist, brings the right light through his documentaries in front of the audience, sure to bring about a change and make a conscious audience of society through his realistic documentaries. And so, he had been criticized and had a controversial side of his journey for the kind of work he produced. Many of his films and documentaries have not even been telecast for the fact of bringing up the reality in front of the society. Jai Bhim Comrade (2011) 3h 20m long and Reason (2018) 4 hours long are the longest yet most controversial documentaries, ironically winning "Best Film South Asia awawd Nepal" and "International Film festival of Amsterdam, 2018" respectively.

His main objective is to bring reality with minuscule use of narration by characters, and very minimum background music as he considers it artificial. Instead, we see a real unanimous community lamenting and expressing the actual plight of the people. He has to put copious efforts into delivering his documentary films to an audience. Sometimes he would go to colleges and sometimes to villages, but he says the amount of impact through this would not be more than 1%. He doesn't praise India by spotlighting the famous leaders of the land and government. Instead, he showcases the real plight of the country of the ordinary people, labourers, and workers battling through it as a Hero. Bringing change with non-violence and his never to give up attitude will surely bring changes in society in some way.