It is often said that passion is all you need to see things through. It is natural to doubt this dictum but every once in a while someone comes along to prove it right again. Mumbai-based Katyayan Shivpuri is living proof of that. Like every other person living in the City of Dreams, he loves movies and happens to work in the film industry (he was one of the assistant directors in the Amitabh Bachchan starrer Bhootnath). The 28-year-old made his first short film for the Swachh Bharat Short Film Festival, organised by the National Film Development Corporation. On October 2, his entry Murga was awarded the best film and a cash prize of ten lakhs at Siri Fort, Delhi. “The pessimist in me believed that I wouldn’t win at all and the optimist believed that maybe I would. Irrespective of that, I put in a lot of hard work,” he says. Couple this with passion and his movie was singled out as the winner amongst 4,346 entries in more than 20 languages.
“I did not want to be preachy or tell people what to do. I wanted it to be nice and cute and something that makes an impact. That’s where children came in, because they have a certain innocence to them,” says Katyayan when talking about Murga, which he says dwells in the mockumentary category.
The idea was simple – “When we were in school, the kind of punishment we used to get was murga,” says Katyayan, talking about the familiar position of a chicken the notorious ones were asked to assume when they got too naughty.
In this film, whenever anyone litters, children take up this position, evoking a guilty feeling and spreading the message of Swachh Bharat. In fact, for the ten-member crew who shot in true guerilla style across Mumbai, the message had started spreading much before. “When we were shooting in Bandra, we littered the place for a shot and the caretaker started scolding us for doing so, as he was unaware that we were shooting,” laughs Katyayan as he shares the incident.
Talking about the cast and crew he says, “Some were friends, some liked the script, some believed in me — it was a pure collaborative effort, he says.