Nivin Pauly won the Best Actor award for Moothon at the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF). The Geetu Mohandas film bagged three awards after it was selected for the competition on July 24.
While Sanjana Dipu won Best Child Actor for her role in the movie, Moothon also won an award under the 'Best Film' category.
Set in Lakshadweep and Mumbai, Moothon is about a 14-year-old boy who lands up in Mumbai in search of his elder brother. The film is a bilingual drama in Hindi and Malayalam and has a cast which includes Nivin, Sanjana, Roshan Mathew, Shashank Arora, Sobitha Dhulipala, and others.
While it is director's Geetu Mohandas's third project as a filmmaker, Moothon is also Geetu Mohandas’s first full-length film. Her second movie Liar’s Dice won international acclaim and catapulted her to fame as a noted filmmaker.
While Geetu wrote dialogues of Moothon’s Malayalam bits, Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap wrote the ones in Hindi. The cinematography of the film is done by Rajeev Ravi. The movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. Last week, the film had its OTT release on Zee5.
Meanwhile, actor Garggi Ananthan won 'Best Actress' for her lead role in Run Kalyani. The 2019 movie is filmmaker J Geeta's debut 100-minute feature and is a young cook (in her 20s) who is trapped in her routine and her duties (of earning a livelihood, taking care of her ailing aunt etc).
Meanwhile, Tailing Pond, a 2019 documentary directed by Saurav Vishnu won Best Documentary at the festival. The film is on Uranium mining and the human and environmental threats it poses to villagers. Best Feature Documentary went to Son Rise, directed by Vibha Bakshi. The film is set in Haryana where patriarchy is deep-rooted and focuses on sex-selective abortions which are rampant in the region.
The Best Short (Narrative) award went to Arabian Nights, Best Screenplay to Knock Knock Knock, written by Sudhanshu Saria, and Best Director to Anchal Mishra for his 2019 film Gamak Ghar.