The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata (1990)

Jealousy and hatred is what separates the Pandavas and Kauravas. The Kauravas fear the Pandavas are after the throne of their father. Yudhishthira of the Pandavas gets told by the deity, Krishna, that he will become king. A war is inevitable.

Date of release
1990-01-24
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (19)
Runtime
2h 53m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Peter Brook

Casting

Interesting facts

The Mahabharata is a 1989 television miniseries and film adaptation of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, directed by Peter Brook. It is based upon the French-language stage play based on the epic, written by Jean-Claude Carrière and directed by Brook in 1985. The film features a large ensemble cast, including Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Andrzej Seweryn, Georges Corraface, Mallika Sarabhai, Miriam Goldschmidt, Jeffrey Kissoon, Sotigui Kouyaté, Ciarán Hinds, and Erika Alexander. The musical score was composed by Toshiyuki Tsuchitori, drawing upon the work of Rabindranath Tagore.

Production

The French and eventual English version of the Mahabharata took several years for Brook and Carrière to write and bring to the stage. Three years before the film version was made, Peter Brook staged their adaptation in French at a quarry in Avignon, France. This and the eventual filmed version were the first time that the entire (albeit abridged) story of the Mahabharata was brought to the stage and made into a feature film.

The series was produced by new French company Les Films du Troisième Etage as well as international co-producers from 18 different countries, including Britain's Channel 4 Films, France's La Sept, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Mahabharata Limited, a company involving Brook.

Using an elaborate-yet-minimal set and multi-racial cast from 16 different countries for the film, Brook's Mahabharata stood in contrast with the "opulently religious melodrama" of the 94-episode BR Chopra version of the Mahabharata which aired a year before the Brook-Carrière adaptation appeared on TV.

The show was shot at the Joinville Studios near Paris. Chloé Obolensky adapted her original sets and costumes for the series.

The screenplay was the result of eight years' work by Brook, Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne. While working on the adaptation, Estienne travelled across Nepal and India, journeying from Manipur to Kanchipuram, in order to learn of the many different forms of the ancient epic from "Brahmins and writers and dancers and theatre people" across the subcontinent.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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