Farm Fresh

Hadawale,however,seems to be unmoved by the attention heaped on him and his film. His rustic background keeps coming back and that explains his grounded demeanour. Surrounded by sugarcane farms,the walls and the floors in his humble home are made of mud and coated with cow-dung. On one side is a heap of onions and garlic,probably the latest crop. Cows are tied near a well on the other side of the house. He beckons to a charpai for us to sit on and offers water in a lota. Even as we struggle to gulp water without spilling it,Hadawale attends to a call from director Imtiaz Ali,who will be promoting DIC.

Incidentally,Ali and Chitrangadha Singh were Hadawale’s first choices for the film. But other projects kept them away. Hadawale even approached Rani Mukherjee,who agreed but had problem of dates.

The interiors of the house offer another sliver of the filmmaker’s life. Various trophies adorn a wooden shelf. Besides the National Award,his first film Tingya (2007) had won as many as 57 awards. “I prefer to keep all my awards here at Rajuri,” he says showing his latest win,a life-size memento received for DIC at BIFF.

Shot mostly in Rajasthan,DIC releases in August and is about the struggle of a not-so-well-to-do family of Rajasthan. It also reflects the perplexities of rural India. But Hadawale is quick to point out that it is not about hungry kids,teary mothers and drunken fathers. “I am not selling poverty; I’m just portraying country’s reality in an entertaining way,” he says. He auditioned 11,800 kids before finalising Suhani and Virendra from Rajasthan villages.

For someone who was never formally trained in filmmaking and who saw the camera for the first time during Tingya,genres such as mainstream,art,commercial,festival circuit and so on do not matter. “For me,there are just two categories — good films and bad films,” says the filmmaker.