Sachin Kundalkar

Sachin Kundalkar was interested in films from his schooldays. While he was a student, he joined the then newly formed team of Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhtankar and assisted them for six years: from Doghi (1995) to Dahavi Fa (2002). Soon after his graduation in Commerce from the University of Pune, he joined the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, where he made his first short film Out of the Box. With a scholarship from the French Government, he then attended  La Fémis, Paris, and made a short film, One Cafe Please. He made his feature film debut with Restaurant.

Kundalkar is also a playwright and novelist, his Marathi novel Cobalt Blue being published in 2006 (English edition in 2013). He wrote and published three plays: Dreams of Taleem, Chotyasha Suteet aka On Vacation and Fridge Madhe Thevlela Prem: Purnaviram aka Fullstop. The last two plays were staged in Marathi and English.

Kundalkar’s creative work has often explored explicitly homosexual themes. Cobalt Blue concerns a brother and a sister from a traditional Marathi family falling in love with the same man. His first film on homosexuality was the 2005 short film The Bath, starring Rajat Kapoor, which bagged the second prize at the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association Awards and was also screened at the 30th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. Kundalkar has also portrayed homosexual characters in his Marathi plays Chotyasha Suteet and Poornaviram.

He is a recipient of two National Film Awards, as a director for Nirop (2007) and as a screenwriter for Gandha (2009), the first Marathi film to win Best Screenplay award since the category's institution in 1967.