Silicon Valley engineer-turned-filmmaker Rajnesh Domalpalli’s provocative debut film Vanaja has had a dream festival run in 49 countries.
Rajnesh Domalpalli's Vanaja won 24 world awards, but is stuck with Indian censors
NEW YORK: Silicon Valley engineer-turned-filmmaker Rajnesh Domalpalli’s provocative debut film Vanaja has had a dream festival run in 49 countries. It even won the best first feature at the Berlin international film festival last year, but Indian censors have held up the film’s commercial release seeking nine cuts.
Titillating dances, pointless rape scenes and obscene double entendres are passed without a hitch. But Domalpalli has been struggling to get a certificate for Vanaja as the Telugu film with English subtitles touches upon the rape of a minor.
“There is a rape of a minor which is a hard subject, but that is not what the film is about. It is about class structures and boundaries in rural Andhra,” Domalpalli, who shot the film as his thesis project at Columbia University on a $20,000 budget, told DNA.
Critics have pointed out that where most films would convey the trauma by showing actual rape, Vanaja shows the pain of the aftermath.
Domalpalli’s student film has a non-pro cast, nearly as humble in their origin as the characters they play. It revolves around a feisty 15-year-old lower-caste girl, Vanaja (Mamatha Bhukya), whose father sends her to work with the village’s wealthy landlady Rama Devi. Vanaja charms Rama Devi into teaching her kuchipudi and the film skips along until Devi’s spoiled-rotten son Shekhar (Karan Singh) shatters Vanaja’s dreams.
“It should be a matter of pride to get a film like this released. It is not a question of the film doing well abroad. It is a question of what it represents,” Domalpalli says. “It is a shame that no one is willing to screen it in India. It has been disowned by its own.”
Domalpalli did electrical engineering at IIT-Bombay. He wrote The Dowry, which was aired by BBC World Service, when he was a student in Mumbai. “The world will always get along without another engineer. Why not do something that you care about?
“I didn’t have a camera those days. I bought my first in the US,” Domalpalli, whose film is a little wasted on DVD because of its cinematic beauty, says.
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