NAFA Film Festival Puts Marathi Cinema On The American Map

Abhi Gholap has had two careers: first as a Bay Area entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the healthcare space, and the other as a producer of Marathi films like the National Award-winning Deool . Now, in his third act, he is combining his expertise as an investor and a passion for Marathi cinema through the North American Film Association (NAFA), with the objective of producing and distributing Marathi films in the United States.

Soon after establishing NAFA, Gholap and his team created a network of more than 800 Marathi actors, directors, cinematographers, and editors. They also invited Marathi scripts and stories, the only condition being that the production of the films would take place in North America.

Before long, NAFA had facilitated the production of multiple films in the United States, matching hungry talent with willing financiers. NAFA too produced three short films titled Nirmalya , Paayrav and Dear Pra.

“Now that we are producing locally, distributing globally, we also need to celebrate Marathi cinema every year, and that is why we started this film festival,” said Gholap in an interview after the first edition of the NAFA Film Festival, held in San Jose on July 27th and 28th.

At the grand California Theater in San Jose, the festival curated a selection of award-winning Marathi feature films, NAFA-produced and American-made Marathi short films, as well as masterclasses by noted directors like Umesh Kulkarni and Jabbar Patel; and actors Mrinal Kulkarni, Dilip Prabhavalkar, Mahesh Manjrekar, Nivedita Saraf, and Subodh Bhave.

Sthal – A Moving Portrait Of Vidarbha

On the first day of the festival, after screening the short films Nirmalya , Paayrav and Dear Pra, the marquee screening of the afternoon was a screening of Sthal (A Match). Director Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s feature debut premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and won the prestigious NETPAC award there. The film also won the Best Marathi Film award at the Pune International Film Festival – a partner festival to the NAFA Film Festival – earlier this year.

Loosely, the film tells the story of Savita, an ambitious student aspiring to the civil services from Dongargaon, a village in Vidarbha, who has to contend with her family’s desire to marry her off quickly.

“This film is very special to me because I filmed it in my birth village of Dongargaon, in the very home that I grew up in,” said Somalkar addressing the audience before the screening. He also shared that none of the actors in the film are professional actors, but are the actual residents of Dongargaon.

The film starts off on a lighter note, capturing the mundane rituals that her family engages in every time a prospective groom’s family arrives to “inspect” Savita. The long, uninterrupted shots evoke the palpable awkwardness of everyone present. Each time, Savita (Nandini Chikte) answers the same irrelevant questions that reduce her entire personality to her height, her ancestry, her education and her hobbies. With a subdued rage in her eyes, she endures the ordeal and channels her rebellion towards completing her bachelor’s degree and becoming a civil servant.

Apart from commenting on this inherently patriarchal form of matchmaking, the sharp writing delivers laugh-out-loud moments as we get a glimpse of life in Dongargaon. We see young love blossoming through stolen glances at a bus stop and “good morning” texts sent on Whatsapp; we watch Savita’s mother dragging her to the astrologer to ask t when she will find a suitable match; and follow her brother Mangya’s secret relationship with a neighbor, as he texts her at night under the stars in his family’s cotton field.

However, this is no lighthearted comedy. In the second half of the film, the backdrop of agrarian distress in Vidarbha comes to the foreground, as Savita’s father Daulatrao (Taranath Khiratkar) struggles to get a fair price for his crop and raise money for his daughter’s wedding. We share Savita’s anger towards her father for forcing her into marriage, but we also empathize with Daulatrao as descends deeper into panic as his family’s financial future becomes bleaker with each passing day.

My favorite line from the film comes from Mangya’s friend who says, “A farmers’ son shouldn’t fall in love, they never get a fair price.” If you replace the word “sons” with “daughters” in that sentence, you get the sobering moral of the film.

A Masterclass in Short Film

Shortly after the screening of Sthal , Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni, the award-winning director of movies like Deool, Valu and Vihir , gave a short masterclass about the short film genre of which he is a fan. Speaking to an audience of cinema enthusiasts, professional and amateur actors, and filmmakers, Kulkarni shared how he began his journey in the film world after a chance meeting with legendary filmmaker Sumitra Bhave, eventually becoming a director himself, while his feature films won commercial and critical acclaim.

“Sometimes a short story will leave you feeling something that even a whole novel could not. It is the same with short films,” he said.

Their smaller production budget often make short films a better format to start one’s film-making journey, he explained, adding that the absence of box office pressure lets film-makers test t their creativity and experiment within the genre.

Citing an example from his own short film Girni (Flour Mill), Kulkarni explained how he and his team recorded the sounds of multiple flour mills and deployed them strategically to evoke different emotions within the film.

He noted that great writers and playwrights had nurtured a robust literature and theater tradition in Marathi before films came along. As a result, early Marathi film-makers borrowed heavily from books and plays, which were conceptually dense and often grounded in social issues. Like its source material, Marathi cinema also developed a cerebral bent and became known as a tradition that prioritizes thoughtful storytelling.

“The good thing about Marathi cinema is we don’t have stars, the content is the star,” said Kulkarni in a short interview after the masterclass.

Connecting with One’s Roots Through Film

For Keya Zingade, a film student and volunteer for the festival, Kulkarni’s masterclass – and the whole film festival was professionally and personally rewarding.

Zingade spent the first eight years of her life in Mumbai before her family moved to Boise, Idaho, where “For a little bit, I was trying to fit in, which unconsciously made me start distancing myself from Indian culture in general,” said Zingade. Eventually, she revisited Indian films when she developed an academic interest in cinema.

Now, Zingade is a student of film-making at the University of Austin, Texas, and is rediscovering the tradition of Marathi cinema as an exercise in discovering more about her own Maharashtrian roots.

“I think Marathi cinema is about interconnectedness,” she said. Echoing Umesh Kulkarni’s view of Marathi films as being grounded in social issues, she added , “It’s about people’s relationships with each other, the world around them, and it promotes a really interesting conversation, not just with other people, but within yourselves too.”

Gholap echoed Zingade’s sentiments when he promised that every year, the NAFA film festival will continue to showcase films with “sensible content”. Through NAFA, he hopes that Marathi film-makers and artists in North America give rise to a new kind of cinema that retains the essence of Marathi cinema and infuses it with a new flavor of its own.

“It’s an attempt to create something which used to be conventionally Marathi in its content, but with a gloss to it,” he said. “So why not have a love story set against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge? Or how about a Marathi thriller set in Las Vegas?”

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