A team of young Goans battled it out with teams across the country to win big at an All India Short Film competition.
The team comprised of Brijesh Kakodker (Director) Ashwin Raiturkar (Cinematographer) Rohan Naik (Voice Over Artist). While Kakodker and Raiturkar are from Margao, Naik is from Ponda and they're all in their early twenties.
Re-Birth foundation from Pune - Maharashtra, organised the Green Corridor Short Film Competition 2017. The topic of the competition was organ donation and the Goan film "Eye See You" was selected from more than 100 entries and won key awards.
The film was very well received. The team explained the need of eye donations in a short and effective manner. The judge included film industry professionals. who appreciated their work personally.
The Goan entry managed to win the second place in Best Film category and also won individual awards for Best Camerawork and Best Sound.
Raiturkar attended the competition screening and award ceremony.
"Our film Eye See You is a short documentary film in which we focused mainly on Eye donation. It was a wonderful experience to work with participants who were given a task to stimulate the feeling of being blind and later asked how they felt and would they opt for eye donation," said Raiturkar..
The film was a collaborative project between Narad Films and Blue Grape Productions. It was was shot in a span of three days and it took two days of post production.
Discussing the work that went into making the film they stated that it took some time to lock onto the concept idea and there were some other minor issues faced. "We had initially planned for a different concept but it didn't work out like how we wanted it and hence we had to come up with a different more efficient concept. Once we had focused on this concept it was not that difficult. However we faced some small issue, as the deadline to send the film to Pune was approaching fast. But the organizers were quite supportive. We managed to send the film on time," added Brijesh while adding that they got to know about the contest via Facebook.
For the contest, a pool of 100 entries were selected from a selection of more than 100 short films submitted by filmmakers across India. The jury chose the best ten from this list and the Goan film, won awards in various departments.
When asked if they were nervous about the selection procedure and the fact that they were taking on some of the best filmmakers in the country, the team replied that they just focused on doing their work and keeping it simple.
"Frankly, we did work faithfully and with complete honesty and didn't think about winning. We are passionate about film-making hence winning awards was very unexpected and surprising to us. During the day of awards we were nervous though," said Aswhin.
Ashwin Raiturkar is a full time photographer and cinematographer and founder of ‘Blue Grape Productions'. He has shot various short films and has also been working as an editor. He has worked as a production assistant for the Konkani film Nirmon.
"The film was exclusively made so that we could send it for this particular competition. As a team Ashwin and I have worked together in past and have also won prizes for various other film competitions. This however was a new and unique experience as the competition was tough as it was at national level. However we made sure we worked hard on the film," added Brijesh.
Brijesh Kakodker has acted in various Konkani and Marathi feature films, TV commercials etc. He is a co-founder of ‘Narad Films'. Formally he has finished his theater studies from Kala Academy Panaji. Recently he directed a short feature film Tiffin Box which stars John D'silva and Rajiv Hede in lead roles.
While the team felt elated and proud to have represented Goa at the national level and on such a big platform, this wasn't their first tryst with awards.
While this is the first award at a national stage, this is the second consecutive award they have have won for a short film competition, while this is the he first award at a national level. Before this competition they took part in an ‘Anti-Tobacco' film festival/competition organised by Entertainment Society of Goa where they received an award for their their television advertisement entry and the film was very well received and praised by the judges.
Speaking about their future plans, the duo stated that they are working on more competitive films and also making feature films. Their ultimate goal is to put Goa on the world map in terms of quality cinema.
