Bollywood actor Rajkummar Rao-starrer 'Newton' has been selected as India's official entry for the Best Foreign Film language category at the Oscars
Rajkummar Rao in 'Newton'
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Bollywood actor Rajkummar Rao-starrer 'Newton' has been selected as India's official entry for the Best Foreign Film language category at the Oscars.
Rajkummar Rao took to Twitter to share the news and wrote, "Very happy to share this news that #NEWTON is India's official entry to the #OSCARS this year. Congratulations team."
'Newton' is an acclaimed political satire directed by Amit Masurkar.
Amit Masurkar says he was dissuaded by people not to shoot in Chhattisgarh but it was an ideal location to set his political satire 'Newton', which revolves around a government clerk's attempt to run a fair election in a conflict-hit area.
The director says the backdrop of Chhattisgarh gave the film the setting it needed to chronicle the story of an election day.
Director Amit Masurkar told mid-day, "I am very happy. Oscar is a big honour. But, honestly speaking, I was not aware who had sent our film for the entry to Oscars. For me, it was a surprise. The news of our film going to the Oscars will give our film a boost. More people would want to go to the theatres and watch the movie. Newton is a story that reflects the reality of our democracy. People have not seen the world of democracy from the point of view of polling booths. It is Newton's attempt to bring the truth forward. In this entire journey, I want to specially thank journalist Mangab Kunjam from Dantewada, where we shot the film. He gave us complete information for this film and also supported us in the entire research."
Amit also thanked his producers Manish Mundra and Aanand L. Rai who encouraged to promote this topic.
The director further said, "Just as his character Newton is honest in the film and used to work with sincerity, Rajkummar Rao is absolutely honest in his real life too."
In an interview with PTI, Masurkar earlier said, "To tell a story about the gap between the idea of democracy and the way democracy functions, we needed to set it in a place where the rights are denied, where there is a conflict, an entity which is trying to disrupt the election process."
"If you look at Chhattisgarh, all these factors are there. It naturally lends a setting for this film."
'Newton', which stars Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Raghubir Yadav and Anjali Patil, is Masurkar's second directorial venture after the 2014 indie 'Sulemani Keeda'.
He had briefly considered shooting the film in the forest of Panchmari (in Madhya Pradesh) but once he visited the jungles of Chhattisgarh, he fell in love with the place.
"It was a topography which we hadn't seen in films before. I fell in love (with the place). We were dissuaded by a lot of people to not shoot in Chhattisgarh because there are no facilities there."
"We were planning to shoot in Maharashtra or Madhya Pradesh but we got a lot of support from the forest ministry. They were very excited that someone from Mumbai was coming to shoot a film there."
The cast and crew travelled to the small town of Dalli Rajhara and they shot the film in the jungles of Chattisgarh for 37 days.
The director says the germ of the idea for 'Newton' was born before he started the post-production for his debut film.
"I wrote the basic first draft in 2013 and completed the shooting script after 'Sulemani Keeda' was released... I wrote it with Mayank Tiwari and it took us around six months to finish the script.
"We had to build electronic voting machines which look exactly like the real ones. We had to construct a village and a school. We had reference photographs but we had to construct it from the scratch. We also had to cast at least 100 local actors and all that was part of the pre-production."
While 'Sulemani Keeda' had a small crew of 7-8 people, there were days during 'Newton' when there were as many as'200-250 people' present on the set.
'Newton' releases today.
See Rajkummar Rao's tweet:
Very happy to share this news that #NEWTON is India's official entry to the #OSCARS this year. Congratulations team.
— Rajkummar Rao (@RajkummarRao) September 22, 2017
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(With inputs from Anupriya Verma and PTI )
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