Marathi film Gondhal is India’s official entry for the 99th Academy Awards

Santosh Davakar’s Marathi film Gondhal will represent India in the Best International Feature Film race at the 99th Academy Awards. The Film Federation of India jury picked it from 33 titles. Davakar, speaking after the announcement, said the team had already begun an Oscar campaign and thanked the government and the federation for the selection.

The film is built around Gondhal, a living ritual form in Maharashtra that mixes music, invocation and social argument. Davakar has described the work as a story about faith and social fact told through a regional form rather than through a tourist version of folklore. That is the pitch India is now sending to Academy voters who have, in recent cycles, rewarded films that carry a specific place rather than a generic nation brand.

Marathi cinema has made this trip before. Shwaas went in 2005, Harishchandrachi Factory in 2009 and Court in 2015. Gondhal is the fourth. The list is short enough that each new title has to carry the memory of the last one. Court, in particular, showed that a Marathi courtroom film could travel on craft rather than on scale. Davakar is asking voters to make a similar jump from ritual performance to narrative cinema.

The selection lands in a year when the “pan-India” label is under strain in commercial circuits. Telugu actor Nani this week refused to tag his film The Paradise as pan-India, calling the phrase overused and naming Telugu as the primary audience even as the film opens in other languages. That comment belongs to a different industry argument. It is useful context for why a federation jury might prefer a film that never pretended to be a national product.

An official entry is a passport, not a nomination. The shortlist and the five-film ballot come later, after the Academy’s own committees watch the submission. India’s recent record in that corridor has been uneven. The campaign now in front of Davakar’s producers is the ordinary, expensive one: screenings in Los Angeles, a press book that explains Gondhal without flattening it, and a subtitle track that does not sand off the Marathi.

Davakar told interviewers the film should represent India by being good cinema rather than by performing a version of India that foreigners already know. That is an easy sentence to print. The hard version is whether Academy members will sit through a ritual they have not seen and accept it as form rather than as ethnography. The federation’s job ended when the envelope opened. The producers’ job starts now.

Thirty-two other films lost the envelope. Several of them will still travel on the festival circuit. Gondhal now travels with a label that opens doors and invites a different kind of scrutiny. The ritual on screen will have to survive both.