Shyam Benegal told the truth of the industry, the great director of the century revealed the distance of 12 years

12 years after the film ‘Well Done Abba (2010)’, filmmaker Shyam Benegal is back with a film titled ‘Mujib: The Making of a Nation’, which will be Bangladesh’s first President Sheikh. is an India-Bangladesh collaboration based on the life of Majebur Rahman.

When asked about what kept him away from directing a feature film for so long, the multiple National Award winning director says, “There are two important things for an independent filmmaker. You should have a topic that excites you enough to inspire and make a film on it. When you’ve got the topic, you have people who put money into it and it’s not always easy.”

Benegal also believes that the boom in television had an impact on cinema, which slowed him down professionally. He said, “Television grew and the audience of cinema shrank. Then the TV spread and things went everywhere. It gave us pause and hence, we were not able to make the kind of films that we wanted to.” He always wanted to keep making films like Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman without any breaks.

While he continues to watch contemporary cinema, he laments the lack of theatrical releases today and the 87-year-old believes that the growth of content on OTT plays a part in that direction. To this he said, “There was a time when India was making the most number of films. When I started making feature films, I was doing three films in two years. Actually, there was a time when I used to have two films in a year. Even today films are being made for the web space. Yes, a little bit of the traditional form of cinema is still being made, but in languages ​​I don’t know.”