MUMBAI, July 15: The occasion was special, the mood was nostalgic, but the proceedings were as simple and no-nonsense as the man himself. Words of praise flowed freely, as did the applause from a packed auditorium at the Y B Pratisthan, when filmmaker Shyam Benegal was felicitated on completing 25 years of a glorious career this evening.``It feels good to be spoilt a little from time to time,'' said Benegal, as Prabhat Chitra Mandal, one of the oldest film societies in the country, inaugurated a special festival of his films. The Mandal has kicked off its 30th anniversary celebrations with a retrospective of Benegal's films.``Apart from his extraordinary range as a filmmaker, his greatest achievement has been the quality of artistes and technicians he has nurtured,'' said well-known playwright, director and Benegal's long-time associate, Girish Karnad, who inaugurated the festival.Benegal recalled how he spent 12 agonising years looking for a producer before he could finally make Ankur, hisfirst film. And that was not the end of it. ``My first choice for the leading lady was Waheeda Rehman, and I was shattered when she refused to do the film. When I started out, the idea was very much to make it the way regular films are made,'' said Benegal.Fortunately, that was not to be. And Ankur not only launched Shabana Azmi's acting career, it defined the off-beat path Benegal was to tread down the years.This was followed by other equally gut-wrenching, straight-from-the-heart films like Bhumika, Manthan, Kondura, Kalyug, Junoon and Mandi. ``I sometimes wonder how extraordinary it was that so many people came together at the same time (in the '70s) to make these kind of films,'' said Benegal about the parallel cinema movement which gave several filmmakers and artists a new form of expression. ``For those of us who worked with him, production of films was like a cultural experience,'' said Karnad.
