Mohana Krishna `eclipses' quite a record

K.V.S. Madhav

`Grahanam' wins the best first film of a director award for director Indraganti My ambition is to make as many literary classics possible into films, says the director

WINNER ALL THE WAY: Tanikella Bharani in `Grahanam'

HYDERABAD: Cinema is his passion, literature a religion. Two different worlds, both endowed with the power to soak the sensitive soul in a million dreams and take it beyond the yonder.

And bringing cinema and literature onto the big wide silver screen and infusing that rare sensitivity into it is his quest.

The quest has already paid off, much before the film could reach the masses. Indraganti Mohana Krishna, brought up on a rich diet of rich Telugu culture and literature, went beyond the boundaries of regular Telugu cinema and made the impossible possible — translating Telugu literature's born revolutionary Chalam's `Grahanam' onto the silver screen.

And the film won him the prestigious Indira Gandhi national award for best first film of a director. The awards were announced in Delhi on Wednesday.

Dream machine

"It is fantastic and a dream come true. If translating literature into cinema is in itself a daunting task, having one of Telugu's greatest works ever on hand doing complete justice to it was all the more difficult. This is unbelievable," he said here on Wednesday.

A post-graduate in Film Studies from York University, Toronto, and having dabbled in English literature doing his Master's and M.Phil in English Literature from the University of Hyderabad, the man of two worlds has his task cut out. "Literature gives one a large canvas on the silver screen and a wealth of emotions that need to be plumbed fully. My ambition is to make as many literary classics possible into films," he enthuses.

No wonder, he plans to make one more literary adaptation, this time another Telugu classic, Buchchi Babu's `Chivaraku Migiledhi'. But, before that a musical entertainer too is in the pipeline.

`Grahanam' was screened at several national and international film festivals, including those at Seattle, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram and " we were waiting for some kind of national recognition as a platform for the film's release."

He says the distribution system in Telugu film industry was not all that receptive to such films. But, with the national award, Mohana Krishna says this is the best time for it to reach out to the Telugus and the film is likely to hit the marquee in a month. An alumnus of Andhra Loyola College, he wrote several documentaries for the Doordarshan. He also made a 37-minute film `Chali.'

Courtesy: The Hindu