Vidhu Vinod Chopra: cinema studied by students not coming from our roots

Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra feels it is unfortunate that film students in the country are more interested in learning how the western filmmakers made movies rather than knowing about the work of iconic Indian directors.

Chopra says students are learning cinema which is 'not really coming from our roots', which is sad.

'It's very sad that all the students of cinema in this country only read about how Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and others shot films. Do they know how Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan, K Asif, Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor made films? Not really,' he says.

'It's very sad that our students are learning cinema which is not really coming from our roots. We are talking, listening to all western books on script writing,' he rules.

The filmmaker was speaking at the launch of Film Heritage Foundation's book 'Yesterday's Films For Tomorrow', last evening.

The book is a compilation of the writings of legendary film archivist late P K Nair and has been edited by Rajesh Devraj.

Chopra stressed how film archiving is an extremely important step to preserve movies and narrated how his film 'Satykatha', starring Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, has been lost forever.

He says the government should honor Nair to celebrate his contribution towards cinema.

'If the government is listening we can honor Nair sir as much as we can but it needs to wake up and give him Padma Bhushan or an honor like that because he was the only person in the country who gave his life for cinema,' he says.

Also present at the event were Naseeruddin Shah, who read extracts from the book, filmmaker Shyam Benegal, Film Heritage Foundation's founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur among others.

Megastar Amitabh Bachchan, who is the foundation's brand ambassador, could not make it to the event due to high fever but sent a letter which also stressed the importance of film documentation.

-PTI