Hindi & English to Santali & Mundari: Changing language of FTII student films

Santali is spoken in and around Jharkhand by people from the Santal tribal community. And this change at FTII is reflective of a larger trend: an increasing number of student films being made in languages other than Hindi or English. “It’s a wonderful kind of a change. In some of the (languages), it is required that someone comes and makes good films,” said Professor Sandeep Chatterjee, head of the Direction department at FTII.

According to the film catalogue available at the institute, only eight of the 82 student diploma films made at its film wing from 1988 to 1995 included a language other than Hindi or English. However, in the 2019 film wing batch, the last for which complete data is available, seven of the 10 films incorporated languages such as Assamese, Ho, Malayalam, Marathi, Nagamese, Punjabi and Wancho.

Similarly, in the TV wing 2023 batch, only one film was made solely in Hindi. Three films were made in Marathi, and one each in Malayalam, Gujarati, Haryanvi and Santali. One film was made using a combination of English, Marathi and Hindi while another was made using English, Hindi, Mizo and Nagamese.

While Hindi and English remain popular as film languages at FTII, representation of languages like Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam, and tribal languages has spiked over the past two decades.

Saurav Munda, a film wing 2023 graduate, made his film A River Colored Red in Mundari, spoken by the Munda tribes. His film is set in a mining-rich forested village in Jharkhand scarred by the tension between the state and Naxalites, with the indigenous community suffering the most. The film’s story unfolds through the eyes of Rimil, a 12-year-old boy, and includes real and mythical elements.

“To me, language is the soul of this film. I cannot imagine telling this story in Hindi or English, because doing so would drain away the authenticity of the land, its people, and their lived culture. The language of a film must rise from the soil it inhabits — from the voices, memory, and rhythm of the place it portrays. Choosing any dominant language would have stripped the story of its identity,” Munda said.

Chirag Solanki, also from the TV Wing 2022 batch, made his film Through my eyes in his mother tongue Gujarati. “The great writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, said that every language gives a thought to itself. Meaning your mother tongue gives you thoughts you don’t even know. So while writing in Gujarati I felt most grounded. I also think we switch personalities (while switching languages). Even right now talking to you in English, I am a different person, right?” Solanki said.

According to Wasimbarry Maner, Associate Professor of Film Production at FTII, the “democratisation of media” is a key reason for this shift. “If you go back 20-30 years, a character speaking any language, which is not mainstream Hindi or English, would be a caricature. But with the emergence of digital media and democratisation of media, people having access to cameras and mobile phones started creating content. You see content in all languages and everybody is feeling, ‘okay, my tongue is also represented’,” he said.

Maner says the spread of internet streaming platforms, which has increased exposure, also contributed to the shift. “Internationally, discourse and respect around languages is changing,” he said.

This change has not gone unnoticed, either. Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know…, a Kannada film by Chidananda Naik, of the 2020-21 TV Wing batch, won the La Cinef award for Best Short at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, and Naik won the National Film Award Best in the Script Writer category in 2025.

The next year, Nikhil Shinde’s Marathi film Dump Yard won the Silver Comma Award in the Indian fiction competition at the 7th Alpavirama International Youth Film Festival 2024. Waterman, another Kannada film by FTII student Vishwas K of the 2018 Film Wing won the Best Short Fiction Award at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala in 2024.

However, Prof Chatterjee offered a note of caution, too. Pointing out that most of the student films are shot within 200 km of Pune, he said trying to recreate a mini-home state, instead of capturing the “immediate reality” of the surroundings, might not be the best practice from a learning point of view and might put students in “a comfort zone”.

An alternative, he said, is for a student to make a film in the language of a different region entirely. “You don’t generally see that a person from the South is creating the North of India. Or a person from the North is creating the South of India,” he said.

A testament to Prof Chatterjee’s point is former FTII student Payal Kapadia, whose film All We Imagine As Light won the Grand Prix award at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. The film was made in Malayalam, a language Kapadia does not speak.