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His debut film Tingya is the toast of the festival circuit and headed for Cannes this summer. For Mangesh Hadawale—a farmer’s son and a one-man theatre troupe—this is just the beginning.

I meet mangesh hadawale at his one-room flat in the fishermen colony of Mahim in Mumbai. This urban ghetto is similar to the rural world he hails from, in its laziness, open spaces, colourful but crumbling hutments and a huge banyan tree under which men, dogs, kids and travellers enjoy an afternoon siesta. A strange address for someone who is the latest toast of the Indian film festival circuit. Hadawale’s directorial debut, Tingya, a Marathi film on a boy’s relationship with his ailing bull told in the backdrop of farmer suicides in Maharashtra, is heading for the Cannes showcase this summer after having pipped Taare Zameen Par and Chak De! India to the Best Film award at the 10th Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) film festival held in Mumbai recently.

“Mujhe apni fakiri ka na koi dar hai na afsos hai,” begins the 28-year-old as he gamely climbs up the banyan trunk for a photo shoot. “I live the life of a free bird. Yesterday, I was roaming in the forests of my village Rajuri (90 km from Pune), listening to the songs of Aandhi under a starry sky. It was bliss. Today, I am in Mumbai to address a press conference before Tingya’s theatrical release this Friday. Next month, I will be in Naples at a festival showcasing the film. I prefer unpredictability,” he says.

Perched on the tree, he takes me by surprise with his question. “So how are you going to sell me in your article? I have pictures of myself tilling the fields, tending my bulls, and the like,” he says, breaking into a smile that softens the cynicism. “I mean I don’t want sympathy for being a farmer’s son or for my ‘struggle’. I want people to react to the issues raised in Tingya and talk to me as its writer-director.”

The Mumbai celebration he cherishes most is the windfall at the 10th MAMI film festival. “From borrowing money for a viewer’s pass to attend my first MAMI in 2002 to bagging the critics’ international FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics) award and the Best Film award in 2008…” he pauses. And beating Taare Zameen Par and Chak De! India, I add. “TZP is a personal favourite and Chak De! is a film I have watched many times. It feels good competing and winning against films of such calibre,” he says, laughing at the giant-killer’s tag that his little film has acquired.

While the jury feted Tingya for its ‘touchingly humane telling’, Hadawale regards his best compliment to have come from the Turkish film scholar and jury member, Gonul Donmez-Colin, who found in Tingya a rawness akin to Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.

Much of Tingya comes from the life Hadawale has experienced in his village. “My father is a farmer and I have got a lot of inputs from my younger brother, who after doing his MSc in agriculture, has been working in the suicide-prone Vidarbha belt,” he says. Hadawale grew up in a family of two bulls, four cows, one dog and one cat apart from two brothers and parents—the source of the depiction of the child Tingya’s bond with the bull.

Hadawale is now gearing up for the film’s international showcase. It’s the opening film at the Marathi Film Festival in Mauritius on May 22, has made it to the competitive and the FIPRESCI section at Cannes and is scheduled for a September showcase at the Kodak theatre in LA.

It took four years of waiting and 41 rejections before Tingya finally found a producer in Ravi Rai in October 2006. “I first approached social issue filmmakers and producers I had seen frequenting the festivals. They all said, ‘It’s a good story that needs to be made but I can’t make it.’ I went to commercial filmmakers, one of who suggested getting Urmila Matondkar to play Tingya’s mother, while another wanted his dad to get drunk and watch an item number.”

So when Rai assented without any changes, it was hard for Hadawale to believe. “It was perhaps my animated narration that did the trick as Rai remarked, ‘I am the only lucky one to see the film before it’s made,” he says. Wrapped in a 16-day schedule with mostly non-actors and local people of Hadawale’s home taluka, Junar, at a modest budget of Rs 30 lakh, Tingya has earned four times its production cost, even before its theatrical release.

Tingya’s director, too, has made an unpredictable journey from being a naughty farm boy, who barely scraped through his matriculation with 37 per cent, to the 16-year-old who pulled off one-man stage shows of the cult play Namunedar Mansha in the villages of Junar to a disciple of Vijaya Mehta, Satyendra Dubey and Samar Nakhate at Pune’s Centre for Performing Arts.

Today, 12 film producers are waiting to produce Hadawale’s next film in Hindi, whose script is ready and the casting has just begun. “Titled Package India it looks at the anything-is-saleable attitude—including emotions and values—as an offshoot of globalisation. When I first came to Mumbai, I was surprised to see no one talking to each other. The lack of emotion in urban life inspired me to go rural with Tingya. My next is a reaction to my urban experiences. I will continue making honest films,” he says. We’ll keep watching. ©

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