Mumbai: Indian cinema’s veteran filmmaker and screenwriter Shyam Benegal died on Monday at the age of 90. The filmmaker breathed his last at 6:38 pm at Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai, where he was undergoing treatment for chronic kidney disease.
BJP MP and actor Ravi Kishan, while speaking to ANI, expressed grief over Benegal’s demise. Speaking on working together, the ‘Missing Ladies’ actor shared, “It’s a personal loss for me. When I was trying to find my identity, he gave me the film Welcome to Sajjanpur… I told him Learned a lot… He was dedicated to the art… He never allowed his cinema to be contaminated by the message. His cinema was making me miss him. Is…”
Benegal’s films including Ankur, Nishant, Manthan and Bhumika established him as a pioneer of the Indian parallel cinema movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Benegal has been awarded the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi seven times and received the V. Shantaram Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Born on December 14, 1934 in Hyderabad into a Konkani-speaking Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin family, Benegal collaborated extensively with FTII and NSD actors, including Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Amrish Puri. .
Addressing relevant socio-political themes with remarkable depth, his films left a lasting impact on audiences. His most recent project, Mujib: The Making of a Nation (2023), was an India-Bangladesh co-production depicting the life of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh. The biographical film, shot extensively in both the countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, added another feather to his cap.
Apart from feature films, Benegal also made significant contributions to documentaries and television. His iconic series Bharat Ek Khoj and Samvidhan remain standards in Indian television.
He also served as Director of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) from 1980 to 1986 and was a member of prestigious juries including the 14th Moscow International Film Festival (1985) and the 35th National Film Awards (1988).
