Oonga (2013)

Curiosidades

Oonga is a Hindi and Oriya film directed by Devashish Makhija, and produced by Speaking Tree Pictures & Moo Print Pictures. It is a story of a little adivasi boy's obsession with becoming Rama, set against the backdrop of corrupt land mining activities threatening to destroy his village and the civil strife it leads to. The film stars Nandita Das, Seema Biswas, Salim Kumar and Raju Singh.

Production and development

The idea for Oonga came to Devashish Makhija from a journey through the tribal belt of South Orissa and North Andhra with the photo-journalist Javed Iqbal, and documentary filmmaker Faiza Ahmad Khan. The film was shot on a limited budget, on a tight schedule of 18 days.

The story of Oonga found its seed in a small anecdote Devashish Makhija heard while in Koraput, Orissa. He recalls Sharanya Nayak, the local head of Action Aid there telling him how she had taken a group of adivasis to watch a dubbed version of Avatar (2009) . They hollered and cheered the Na’vi right through the film as if they were their own fellow-tribals, fighting the same battles they were.

Most of what is shown in the film is based on real incidents Makhija had witnessed or heard or read of. The character of Hemla was "inspired in part by the case of Soni Sori". About a fortnight before the filming of the abduction scene, in Koraput, Orissa, an adivasi MLA was actually kidnapped from a spot very near to the location for the planned shoot.

Oonga was shot as a bilingual film, and both Oriya and Hindi is spoken in the film. The actors playing Naxalites and the CRPF were from Mumbai, and the actors playing the adivasis were from Orissa, while Nandita Das speaks both languages.

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