Road to Sangam, a film inspired from Gandhi Ji and his principles, has managed to get 3 awards in three different international film festivals. The first award they won was the Audience Choice Award for Best Film in MAMI in Mumbai. Immediately after, Road To Sangam also received the Best 1st Film of the Director Award at International Films Festival of South Africa. Third feather in the cap came as the Best Feature Film Award at the Radar Hamburg Film Festival Germany.
Comments the producer Amit Chheda, “three in a week is not a crowd. The best thing is that all the awards are for the best film. At MAMI we were only Indian feature film to get an award. But the most historical association came from the place in South Africa. The High Points of the Midland, Durban, where the awards were held, is the place from where Nelson Mandela, Gandhi of South Africa was arrested, and 45 KM from there is the station, where Mahatma Gandhi was thrown off from a train. Since our film is emerging from Gandhi Ji’s last journey in Allahabad and his thoughts, it’s a big honor for us.”
Road to Sangam a film woven around the crucial fact of the last journey of Gandhiji on this earth. One of the urns with Gandhi Ji’s ashes, is discovered locked and forgotten in the locker of a bank. It is retrieved and taken to Allahabad for immersion. A simple God fearing, devout Muslim mechanic named Hashmat Ullah (Paresh Rawal) is entrusted the job of repairing the old V8 ford engine of the truck, to carry the ashes. He is not aware of the historic significance, that earlier too, it had carried the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, which were immersed in the ‘Sangam’ of holy rivers Ganga, Jamuna and invisible Sarasvati. A powerful bomb blast in his area, Hashmat is sucked into the vortex of loyalty to the call of protest against police atrocities by his clan and on the other hand towards the man who had sacrificed his life for them.
Adds the director Amit Rai, “Road to Sangam is a simple story told very simply. All my artistes are very strong actors and they have brought all the characters to life. Story idea had come from a small article in one of the newspapers that had caught my curiosity. Inspired from Gandhi Ji and his ideas, it deals with today, the current global issues and problems we are facing. I am proud that the audience could connect and accept them as their own. I will always be grateful to my producer Amit Chheda for having faith in me and my project. Standing ovation by audiences was as much for gandhigiri as it was for him.”
Even during its first public screening at CANNES, the audience had loved the film so much that makers had to arrange for second screening to accommodate the rest of the crowd.
Presented by Gipsy Films & Shashikant Chheda, Road to Sangam is produced by Amit Chheda and directed by Amit Rai. Star cast includes Paresh Rawal, Om Puri, Javed Shaikh, Pavan Malhotra and Swati Chitnis.
