Anurag Kashyap’s assistant Neeraj Ghaywan shines at Cannes Film Festival with his debutant film MASAAN

While the audience may have given a thumps down to Anurag Kashyap’s most dear film BOMBAY VELVET but his home production MASAAN, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan has won a thumps up at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

According to latest reports MASAAN, produced by Anurag Kashyap and directed by debutant director Neeraj Ghaywan has floored the audience at Cannes Film Festival, who were so overwhelmed by the movie that the audience gave a thunderous applause and a five-minute long standing ovation!

Surely the movie’s success at Cannes must have broaden Anurag Kashyap’s chest and given him a sigh of relief because the kind of cinema he his encouraging will surely in days to come change the face of Indian cinema.

Speaking about the movie, it took three years for Neeraj Ghaywan to complete the script. In an interview Ghaywani said, “MASAAN is an attempt of escaping the conventional mindset, the rigid social structure."

He added, “MASAAN is set in the religious city of Varanasi and touches the age old tale of a low caste man (in this case Dom community, who work at cremation grounds) falling in love with a high caste girl but what makes the movie intriguing is its authentic backdrop and its innovative treatment.”

Readers would be surprised to know that Neeraj Ghaywan, is an electrical engineering graduate from Hyderabad’s Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology and was earning a six figure salary but his passion for cinema drew him to filmdom and he quit his lucrative job.

“I started my cinematic journey by contributing actively to the film website PassionForCinema.com (not functioning presently) through which I came in contact with Anurag Kashyap, who would blog enthusiastically on the site,” he informed.

He added. “One day to my surprise Anurag Kashyap called me and asked me, if I would be interested in assisting him on ‘GANGS OF WASSEYPUR’, which was to be screened at the Cannes International Film Festival.”

He continues, “ I nodded and today my directorial film has been filmed at the same festival, where many legendary filmmakers’ of Indian cinema like Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, M S Sathyu’s and Shyam Benegal’s film have been screened! “