Film editor from Goa wins National Award

Team Herald

PANJIM: Rameshwar Bhagat, resident of Dona Paula, and editor of scores of hit Hindi films, has bagged the 2017 national award in the editing category for the Marathi film ‘Ventilator’.

The 64th National Film Awards ceremony took place on Wednesday, at Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi, during which Bhagat was felicitated by President Pranab Mukherjee. Bhagat has featured prominently in the credits in such blockbusters as Dhoom, Dhoom 2, New York, Unnaipol Oruvan (Tamil), Ek tha Tiger, Kick, Bajrangi Bhaijan, Sultan, and many more.

Bhagat said, “As a Goan, I feel we should give the youth of Goa better exposure to the film making process, so we can nurture the best talent. We have a lot of Goans working in our film industry in Mumbai.”

Born in 1974, Rameshwar Bhagat grew up in a joint family and was educated in Mumbai. His parents, Shivaji V Bhagat and Swati S Bhagat, run a restaurant in Gudi Paroda for the last 45 years. He is married to Pallavi Bhagat from Khed, an interior designer. During his college years, he was attracted to technical aspects of filmmaking and after graduating (B.Sc. Chemistry) from Elphinstone College in 1995 he found his calling in editing and began his career as a trainee with Rajkumar Hirani, assisting him with editing for almost seven years.

His first individual credit as a film editor was Yashraj Films ‘Dhoom’ which was a runaway success at the box office recognising his talent as an editor, winning three awards: Filmfare, Screen and GIFA for best editing. He continued working with several reputed Bollywood production houses and has edited scores of hit films including Ventilator, the first Marathi film he edited for which he won the National Award as ‘Best Film Editor’.

Priyanka Chopra’s maiden Marathi production won in three categories, including Best Director, at the 64th National Film Awards. Rajesh Mapuskar won Best Director, while Best Sound Mixing went to Alok De for the film.

The Marathi film, produced by Priyanka and her mother Madhu Chopra under their production banner Purple Pebble Pictures, revolves around an ailing senior member of a family who is put on ventilator just days before the popular Ganpati festival, leading to varied degrees of speculation and panic amongst the family.

The first draft of Ventilator had a different ending. After discussing with the director, Bhagat had to rework the ending while the shoot was still going on and came up with a new ending which turned out even better.

Another big challenge was time management, since he was busy with other Hindi film projects. He had to edit this film at night and landed up working till early morning most of the time. “Working on a film with more than 100 characters is a massive challenge to establish each character with a proper storyline, but the beginning of the film where all these characters are introduced took nearly 35 minutes of screen time, which was too long for the film so we had to cut it down to eight minutes of screen time, without losing the humor and storyline. That alone took us 10 days to edit,” he recalls.