Satya (1998)

Original title

सत्या

Directed by

Ram Gopal Varma

Genre

drama film, crime film

Country

India

Runtime

2h 51m

Rated

A

Rating

7.2 of 10 from 76 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A man moves to Mumbai for work and gets pulled into the city's criminal underworld after befriending a gangster. The film shows how he becomes part of organised crime.

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What happens

Satya is a 1998 Indian Hindi-language crime film, produced and directed by Ram Gopal Varma; written by Saurabh Shukla and Anurag Kashyap. It stars J. D. Chakravarthy, Urmila Matondkar and Manoj Bajpayee, alongside Saurabh Shukla, Aditya Shrivastava and Paresh Rawal. It is the first of Varma's Gangster trilogy about organised crime in India. The film follows Satya (Chakravarthy), an immigrant who comes to Mumbai looking for a job, befriends Bhiku Mhatre (Bajpayee) and is drawn into the Mumbai underworld. Varma initially planned to make an action film, but decided to make a film focusing on felonies after meeting some criminals. He hired Kashyap and Shukla to write the film, and opted to use lesser-known actors. The soundtrack and score were composed by Vishal Bhardwaj and Sandeep Chowta, respectively, while the lyrics were written by Gulzar. Its early cinematography was done by Gerard Hooper, who was replaced by Mazhar Kamran. The film was shot in Mumbai on a budget of ₹2.5 crore (US$260,000). Satya was released on 3 July 1998 with widespread critical acclaim, particularly for its realistic depiction of the Indian underworld and Bajpayee's performance. It was also very commercially successful, grossing ₹15 crore (US$1.6 million), and helped launch a number of careers (especially for Kashyap and Bajpayee). The film won six Filmfare Awards and a National Film Award. Over the years, Satya has been regarded as a cult film, and is considered one of the greatest films ever in Indian cinema, credited with laying the foundation for gangster films in Bollywood. It inspired several sequels like Company (2002) and D (2005), and a direct sequel, Satya 2 (2013). (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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