National awards ‘free from lobbying’: Sai Paranjpye

New Delhi: Eminent filmmaker Sai Paranjpye, who headed the jury in the feature film category of the 55th National Film Awards for 2007, today said that the focus was to act as a "national jury" free of all pressures. "There is always pressure from regional groups and lobbies. But we (along with other jury heads Ashoke Vishwanathan and Namita Gokhale) decided to act as national

jury, free from lobbying and pressures," Paranjpye said while speaking to reporters after announcing the winners of national film awards 2007 here. On the entire list of winners leaked in the media hours before the official announcements of the names, Paranjpye said that "this was investigative journalism at its best". Director of the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) S M Khan though tried to cover up by saying, "it is an era of speculation... it is good that people are taking this much interest in films." Paranjpye however expressed her dissatisfaction over the fact that "films these days are becoming too verbose. Film makers should have some respect for the intelligence of viewers. In fact we disqualified quite a few films due to this reason". The filmmaker also said that she was disappointed that this time "no good films were received from hubs of film making like West Bengal and Kerala". She added that even states like Andhra Pradesh (which produces maximum number of films annually), Assam and Punjab had no entries for the awards.