Purti Savardekar, an assistant professor at the Goa College of Engineering, Farmagudi has won the “Best Actress” in the recently concluded “Filmfare Short Film Awards” for the film “The First Wedding” written & directed by Akshay Parvatkar. She stars in a film The First Wedding which is a story about love.
Bhumi and Akash fall In love and decide to get married, an unheard union in a world of otherwise only same sex couples. We see snippets of their life through self-recorded camcorder footage, and an interview discussing their decision to fight the system, and simply follow their hearts. The film was written, shot, directed, edited and completed in 60 hours, for the 60Yearsin60Hours film contest on the eve of the 60th Goa Liberation day. The film won the “Best Film”, “Best Director”, “Best Editing” and “Best Actress” awards, decided by a jury comprising four time national award winner Umesh Kulkarni.
The cast and crew included Director: Akshay Parvatkar Cinematographer, Editor: Geetesh Gawas Sound: Saiprakash Sakhalkar Art Department: Aniket Gauns Cast: Anuj Prabhu, Purti Savardekar.
The film was among the top 30 shortlisted films for the “Filmfare Short Film Awards 2021”. A jury comprising of Karan Johar, Ashwini Iyer Tiwari, Kabir Khan, Vikramaditya Motwane and other Bollywood filmmakers nominated 10 of the shortlisted 30 films for the final round. Purti won the “Best Actress” from the hands of filmmaker Vasan Bala at the recently concluded ceremony in Mumbai.
This award validated the years of hard work everyone in the team had put in, especially Purti, assistant professor at the Goa college of Engineering, Farmagudi, and an actor by passion. This award will serve as a great platform and a wake up call for everyone outside of Goa, to look at Goa with a different lens, for the immense untapped potential in Goa, as Purti stated in her acceptance speech at the awards. Akshay Parvatkar, an alumni of Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, intends on making more films in Goa, to help take Goan stories to the world around. The duo stated in an interview that their next goal is to find investors and producers in Goa, to help them facilitate upcoming project.
