Mrityudand

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Mrityudand ("The Death Sentence") is a critically acclaimed 1997 Hindi movie. It was directed and produced by Prakash Jha and stars Madhuri Dixit, Shabana Azmi, Ayub Khan, Mohan Agashe, Om Puri, and Mohan Joshi. It is a commentary on social and gender injustice, and might be considered a feminist movie. As in his other movies, filmmaker Prakash Jha has focussed on the social problems that plague his native state of Bihar, India, and like his other movies this one straddles the boundary between art film and commercial film.

[edit] Synopsis

It is set in the fictional village of Bilaspur, Bihar in 1996. (Bilaspur should not be confused with other places of the same name elsewhere in India.) The movie starts with the grisly portrayal of a mob killing of two defenceless women, orchestrated by vested interests, and how village power players later evade administrative inquiries into this atrocity. This incident sets the tone for much of the rest of the movie.

The central characters are a young couple, Vinay (Ayub Khan) and Ketki (Madhuri Dixit). They are quickly plunged into the midst of machinations by several powerful and unscrupulous villagers. Foremost among them is contractor Tirpat Singh (Mohan Joshi), a powerful, corrupt and ruthless man who oppresses poor people and especially women with impunity. Vinay too becomes influenced by Tirpat, and under this influence spirals down a dark road of domestic abuse, alcoholism, and selfishness that alienates his loving wife and tears apart the whole family, despite her best efforts to fight this.

The rest of the movie deals with their efforts to break out of this morass, both within their relationship as well as outside of it, and Vinay's and especially Ketki's long, hard, and bloody struggle to confront and defeat the forces of oppression and male domination in the village.

Much of the film is shot in rural Maharashtra.