New Delhi: The Marathi thriller Gondhal has been chosen as India’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards.
The decision was made by a jury panel comprising P Sheshadri, Vijay Patkar, Hutu Kanodia, Shanti Kumar, Sandeep Parashar, Sanjay Patil, Sabu Joseph, Anil Thomas, Vivek Vaswani, Bijon Dasgupta, Haasan Vasan, and Tannishtha Chatterjee.
A total of 33 films were submitted for consideration this year. This included 14 in Hindi, four each in Marathi, Telugu, and Gujarati, three in Tamil, one each in Malayalam and Nagamese, as well as one silent film.
Directed by Santosh Davakhar, Gondhal unfolds over a single night in rural Maharashtra during a gondhal, a folk ceremony of music and dance to bless a newlywed couple. The film follows new bride Suman (Ishita Deshmukh), who turns this sacred, night-long ritual into a deadly game of manipulation and survival.
Regional films at Oscars
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound made the 15-film shortlist for Best International Feature at the 98th Academy Awards, while the year before, Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies carried India’s flag.
India has often turned to regional cinema for its submission to the Oscars. In 2024, Jude Anthany Joseph’s Malayalam drama on the Kerala floods, 2018, was selected as India’s official entry. In 2023, Pan Nalin’s Gujarati coming-of-age film Chhello Show (Last Film Show) represented India. In 2022, the Tamil film Koozhangal (Pebbles) was India’s official entry.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
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