Interests

Making Hindi Movies In English

Harshad Oak

Making Hindi Movies In EnglishI am no movie buff or expert, but I do like to stay in touch with what’s happening in the movies and the changing mannerisms of moviewalas…

Article touches on movies, regional languages, Hindi and English. Published as part of my column for the Maharashtra Herald that’s published on alternate Saturdays.

I am no movie buff or expert, but I do like to stay in touch with what’s happening in the movies and the changing mannerisms of moviewalas. Only a few years back it seemed like Indian movies would gradually lose out to English movies partly because of the spread of English education but primarily because Indian movies lacked innovation. They were beating the same stories to death. I was certain that Hindi movies were in big trouble once English movies dubbed in Hindi started being screened.

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Documentary film making – Nagrik

Harshad Oak

I recently completed a short course of documentary film making at OpenSpace. Attended the course for no reason other than learning a new and intersting skill. The course was good fun and I got a lot of info about film making.

Documentary film makers however seemed obsessed with a few things and seem to forget that films esentially are about the viewer liking them and not only about getting critical acclaim.

There was always an attempt to find a deep meaning in every little thing shown on screen. One of the discussions we had in the course was “Why were the tomatoes shown in a film so red. Was there some reason the director chose to show tomatos so red?”. Not much came out of the discussion, but we did eventually named the course googlegroup as ‘redtomato’.

For the practicals we were split into groups of 4-5 people and asked to pick a topic. My team’s documentary was “Nagrik : Documentary on public participation in solving problems faced by a city”

Click here to view the documentary. Have lots more to write about documentary making. Hope to do that soon.