The Satyajit Ray Foundation 2011 Short Film Competition Award goes to Andrew Hinton for his film 'AMAR'.

The Satyajit Ray Foundation are delighted to announce Andrew Hinton as the winner of this year's short film competition for his observational documentary AMAR.   The film, completed in February this year, was one of seven films on the awards shortlist.  For details of the the shortlist please click here.  

The jury also gave a special mention to the film 'The Talking Walls of Lahore' directed by Numra Siddiqui.

Amar is 14 and top of his class. Someday he’d like to be a professional cricketer but for now he’s the family’s mainbreadwinner. AMAR is an observational documentary which leads us through Amar’s daily routine.

The winning film was announced and screened to an appreciative audience on the closing night gala of the London Indian Film Festival (LIFF) at Cineworld Haymarket. 

Picture from right to left; Menhaj Huda (Director), Satwant Gill (Head of Jury), Andrew Hinton (Award Winner) & Cary Sawhney (Director of LIFF)

Andrew Hinton - On making the movie;

I was in Jamshedpur in January researching a project for the organisation Initiatives of Change about a nearby village. I happened to meet Amar through a wonderful series of coincidences, My host was an amazing woman named Mrs Kartha who is director of 5 schools in the city. She took me to visit all her schools, and it was during one of those visits that we came across Amar and his story. I was humbled when he described what he manages to pack in to a day - 2 jobs as well as school in the afternoons. It made me feel as though I waste so much time. He works 6 and a half days a week and is completely committed both to his studies and to supporting his family. I found him very inspiring in his own quiet way.

Because I was traveling quite a bit in India I was working with a pretty stripped down setup. I wanted to be as mobile and as flexible as possible while also being self-contained so that I could operate independently and move quickly.

The idea was to capture a typical day for Amar as truthfully as possible, so I used my Canon 5D Mk II camera, which is a stills camera that shoots beautiful video but is much smaller than a conventional video camera and consequently attracts much less attention. I had a simple shoulder rig to give some stability to the shots, and a microphone attached to the top of the camera. That was pretty much it in terms of equipment. There was no budget to speak of so I just had one person helping me - Biplab Mahato - who acted as intermediary, translator, motorbike driver, and general support! We were the only crew - I shot and directed the film. During the early morning Amar's headmaster joined us while Amar did his paper round, just to make sure everything ran smoothly. But otherwise it was just Biplab, Amar and I together for the day.  I like working in this way - if you have too many crew around it starts getting in the way of what you're trying to capture.

I edited the film in India on Final Cut Pro on my laptop, and then put a posting on the Shooting People mailing list in the UK looking for an online editor in Pune or Mumbai. Someone suggested Saurabh Dalmiya who had recently moved back to Pune from London, and was based at high end animation and graphics company Anibrain in Pune. We spent a couple of days really trimming the edit down and then grading the film on Colour.

The sound mix happened when i got back to London - an excellent dubbing mixer called Farrell Lennon kindly agreed to spend a day working on the film, and really cleaned up the mix. I had experimented with adding music but it didn't seem to work. There was something about the simple honesty of just using the natural sound that was broken every time I tried to be clever. So we worked with what we had, and audiences seem to have responded to this 'no-frills' approach.

If you would like to view the film please click on the link  http://vimeo.com/19890458