On April 15, the main auditorium of the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII estb. 1960), Pune was decked up as if for a Hindi film wedding shoot. A massive crowd of 100 plus current and former students of the country’s pioneer and perhaps still most respected film production, direction, set design and acting institute, whose alumni include noted film directors Kundan Shah, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Subhash Ghai and actors Jaya Bachchan, Shatrughan Sinha and Shabana Azmi, turned out en masse to welcome alumnus Resul Pookutty, a former student of sound engineering who graduated from the institute in 1995. The cause of the festivity on the sprawling 21-acre campus of FTII was Pookutty’s visit to his alma mater after winning an Oscar this year for best sound recording in the worldwide hit movie Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle. FTII director Pankaj Rag honoured Pookutty with a memento and a special citation.
“It is a different feeling altogether to come back to the institution where I learned the fundamentals of sound engineering. I am proud to dedicate my two most important awards, the BAFTA and the Oscar, to this institute which moulded me into what I am today, not only in terms of sound engineering but by introducing me to quality cinema,” said Pookutty.
“Pookutty was admitted into FTII after he made a second attempt, not because he wasn’t bright enough, but because we have very limited seats for every course,” recalled Prof. Satish Kumar who taught him sound engineering at the institute from 1992-95. FTII offers only 12 seats for the three-year postgraduate course in sound engineering.
Paying tribute to the high quality of film-related technical education dispensed by FTII, Pookutty made a strong plea for the institute. “The rationale of FTII has often been questioned in the past, and there have been proposals to cut the budget of this Central government-funded institute. This award should make everyone aware of how important high-quality technical education is to the production of great cinema,” said Pookutty.
Born in 1971 in Kerala, Pookutty was admitted into FTII to learn the complex technicalities of sound production in 1992. He made his debut as a sound production engineer in 1997 in the feature film Private Detective: Two Plus Two Plus One and got his first big break in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black. His impressive credentials, including work on several Bollywood productions such as Musafir (2004), Zinda (2006), Traffic Signal, Gandhi, My Father and Saawariya (all in 2007), led Boyle to recruit him to head the sound engineering team of Slumdog.
“It is unfortunate, but in India we give little importance to technicians who work hard to get the look, feel and sound of a film absolutely right. Here, a film is considered successful only if it makes money. That was not the consideration which won me the Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire,” says Pookutty.
And for the students of FTII, Pookutty had a simple message: “There’s really no substitute for hard work and continuous learning.”
Huned Contractor (Pune)