KOLKATA: National-award winning Indian film-maker Shyam Benegal feels that the younger generation of movie directors are less inhibited than his contemporaries.
“Young people are making different films today with fewer inhibitions than my generation did,” said Benegal at the fourth Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival.
“We had certain ideological considerations but today’s young film-makers like Anurag Kashyap, Onir and Habib Faisal and other wonderful film-makers from Mumbai — who I call the post-modern generation — don’t have those ideological considerations,” he added.
Talking about making women-centered films, he suggested that in order to depict women as equals to men, they should be shown as “someone who challenges men” and not be portrayed as victims.
“There are two ways of doing it. Somebody who challenges men, that’s one way of doing it. The other way is not to treat women as a victim because the moment you do that you are challenging the patriarchal system,” Benegal said.
“The fact that a woman does not see herself as a victim helps her grow out of her victim-hood. When she grows out of her victim-hood, she can then aim to be an equal,” he explained.
Benegal feels that films today lack the sense of right and wrong.
“Films can be either descriptive or prescriptive. The fact is that most of the audience would always prefer to see prescriptive films,” said the director, who has films like Arohan, Zubeidaa, Welcome to Sajjanpur and Well Done Abba to his credit.
“If you want to do a prescriptive film you need to have a basic sense of right and wrong. A certain kind of morality built into it. Now there are films that do not even have that. They are quite immoral,” he pointed out.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 14th, 2013.
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