Humbled with National Award for Lata Bhagwan Kare: Naveen Deshaboina

Earlier this week, director Naveen Deshaboina was on a recce in Pune searching locations for his next Hindi film. Twenty minutes after stepping into a temple, he got a call from Directorate of Film Festivals stating that his 2020-release Lata Bhagwan Kare had won a National Award in the Special Mention (Feature Film) category.

A Karimnagar native, Naveen had expected nothing like it. “I was thrilled when I got the call because I never expected the film will get a national award,” says Naveen, adding without missing a beat that the credit goes to the entire cast and crew for their efforts.

Lata Bhagwan Kare is the real-life story of a strong-willed, 65-year-old woman called Lata Bhagwan Kare, a daily wage labourer facing financial crises, which get worse owing to her husband’s ailing condition. Lata is forced to overlook her own ailments to run a marathon in Baramati in the hope to use the prize money for her husband’s treatment.

“All the characters in the film are real and are re-living their own stories on the screen. It shows that if you are sincere in your attempts, hard work will always pay off,” adds Naveen.

Tollywood rejected him

Naveen had come to Hyderabad from his native Karimnagar a few years ago to become a filmmaker. He met several producers in Tollywood for some of his earlier stories on social drama but only faced rejections.

“I stayed in Hyderabad for five years and tried my luck as an assistant director too, but everybody discouraged me, telling me that my stories didn’t have commercial viability,” he adds.

In the meanwhile, he read about Lata’s heroics in a newspaper in Hyderabad, which inspired him to make a film on her. He left for Mumbai in search of her. The rest, as they say, is history.

Lata’s disbelief

It took three days for Naveen to reach out to Lata, with the help of an auto driver who was Lata’s neighbour, eventually meeting her in Baramati, a two-and-half-hour drive from Pune.

“When I met and told her that I hoped to make a film on her, she was initially perplexed. She did not believe me, but after having a few conversations and after seeing our passion and conviction for cinema, she was finally convinced,” says Naveen.

“I told her that the story would take the audience through her struggling days while facing challenges from all fronts and how she walked barefoot on stones, in the scorching sun, etc. I told her that she had to relive all her memories for the film, and she was game for it,” recounts the 33-year-old.

Challenges galore

Once convinced, Lata seemed certain she’d be able to deliver. Despite being sixty-five years old, Lata is a woman of grit and she let Naveen know that she was game for any transformation needed to play herself on screen. The duo was on the same page as far as the script of the film was concerned.

Convincing Lata was, however, only one of the challenges Naveen faced while making the film. For starters, several producers rejected him initially. “Many producers who wanted to cast a reputed actress backed away because I insisted that Lataji should play herself in the film. Eventually, Arrabothu Krishna came forward to bankroll it,” he explains.

Then even as the film was in the writing phase, Lata went on to win two more marathons, in 2014 and 2015. “That gave me more impetus to go all out for my story,” says Naveen, adding that he gave a one-month training in acting to Lata, her husband, Bhagwan (75) and their son, Sunil (35) for their respective roles.

A long way to run

When the film’s principal shooting finally commenced in June 2017, Lata’s injuries and age-related ailments caused delays in the shooting, sometimes even halting it.

For capturing her running, the film’s unit had shot footage of Lata running live in her marathons; throughout the film, Lata had run around 200 km.

“I think that’s incredible for a woman who is nearing seventy years,” says Naveen, his respect for the woman palpable in his voice. The unit finally wrapped up the shooting of the film in January 2019 and released it in Marathi language.

“I wanted to cast original people for the sake of authenticity, so I went ahead with the cast I have in the film. So at first I wrote the dialogues in Telugu and then had it translated into Hindi and later into Marathi,” adds Naveen, who now plans to make the film in Hindi too.

Meanwhile...
Lata is proud and ecstatic that her film — and one that’s made on her too — won a National Award.

“We never expected this; it’s a great feeling of pride and our entire family was emotional. We couldn’t have asked for a better gesture than winning the award. We have been getting several calls and we are glad that the entire country came to know about our film,” she says genuinely as she thanks Naveen for his efforts in bringing her story alive.