Vidhu Vinod Chopra
Vidhu Vinod Chopra (born 5 September 1952) is an Indian film director, producer, editor, screenwriter, lyricist and actor.[1] His well-known films include Parinda, 1942: A Love Story, the Munna Bhai film series (Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. and Lage Raho Munna Bhai), 3 Idiots, PK, Sanju, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga and Shikara. He is the founder of Vinod Chopra Films and Vinod Chopra Productions.
Chopra was born and grew up in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India.[2] His father was D. N. Chopra and veteran filmmaker Ramanand Sagar was his half-brother.[3] His father’s family originally came from Peshawar, British India.[4] His mother was Shanti Devi Mahalakshmi who left Kashmir with him and family after the migration of Kashmiri Pandits due to the Kashmir conflict in 1990. He dedicated his movie Shikara to his mother which is based on the same theme.[5] He studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune.
Chopra’s first student short film, Murder at Monkey Hill, won the National Film Award for Best Short Experimental Film and the Guru Dutt Memorial Award for Best Student Film.[6]
This was followed by a short documentary highlighting the plight of India’s destitute children, called An Encounter with Faces, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Short Subject category in 1979. It also won the Grand Prix at the Tampere Film Festival in 1980.[7]
Sazaye Maut, his first full-length feature film, was an adaptation of his previous short, Murder at Monkey Hill. It starred Naseeruddin Shah, Radha Saluja and Dilip Dhawan. Vanraj Bhatia composed the music for the film. For Khamosh, his next directorial venture, Chopra assembled a cast featuring some of the finest acting talent in India. Shabana Azmi, Amol Palekar, Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapoor, among others, appeared in prominent roles. An inventive meta thriller set in Kashmir, Khamosh remains one of the notable Indian films in the genre.
Parinda (1989), is a landmark film in Hindi cinema. It expanded the orbit of the crime drama and the vocabulary of images used in Hindi films while garnering widespread critical acclaim and numerous awards. Several modern Indian filmmakers have expressed their admiration for and drawn inspiration from Chopra’s film.
Chopra’s next film, 1942: A Love Story, was a patriotic romantic drama set during the decline of the British Raj. With Anil Kapoor and Manisha Koirala in leading roles, it was also the last film to have its music composed by the legendary R. D. Burman. Burman received a Filmfare Award for Best Music Director and the film won a total of nine awards at the 40th Filmfare Awards.
He founded his own production company, Vinod Chopra Films, in 1985. Since then, the company has gone on to produce major Bollywood films, and is currently one of the biggest and most successful film production houses in India. Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak affectionately gave him the name ‘Vidhu’.
