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‘The Mountain Hockey’- The First-Ever Odia Documentary on Disney+Hotstar





‘The Mountain Hockey’- The First-Ever Odia Documentary on Disney+Hotstar

Directed by Avinash Pradhan and Debasish Mohapatra, it is the first ever Odia documentary to be streamed on OTT platform, it’s the first Odia content to be streamed on Disney + Hotstar, one of the most popular OTT platforms.  The film was released on June 4.

Young and talented Odia filmmakers are carving a niche for themselves across OTT platforms these days. Moving away from the beaten track, they are creating exceptional content which is being recognised both nationally and internationally. Odia documentary ‘The Mountain Hockey’, directed by Avinash Pradhan and Debasish Mohapatra is a case in point. Not only it is the first ever Odia documentary to be streamed on OTT platform, it’s the first Odia content to be streamed on Disney+ Hotstar, one of the most popular OTT platforms. The film was released on June 4.

The film narrates the story of a selfless teacher, hockey coach and sports activist Rajendra Kumar Kujuras he goes through a lot of hardship to teach hockey to tribal girls in a remote area of Odisha. While the story is by Avinash, cinematography has been done by Brajaraz Behera. The classy posters of the film have been made by Uday Bharadwaj.

“The Mountain Hockey is our third documentary. I and Avinash have done two other documentaries titled Sambalpuri Weavers and One Screen Cinema before,” informed Debasish who is a die-hard fan of Shahrukh Khan. Both Debasish and Avinash have a mass communication degree and during their college days, had a keen interest in filmmaking.

The film’s story was conceptualised during the hugely successful 2018 FIH Men’s Hockey World Cup in Bhubaneswar. During the hockey world cup, the duo planned to make a documentary to promote women players of the State. They came across Rajendra who was training 400 girls in hockey in a tribal village near Sambalpur-Sundargarh border. Apart from being the headmaster of the local Government girls’ high school, Rajendra was also a father at Amlikhaman Church.

“That’s how the film’s idea took birth and we reached the remote village. It took us almost one month to research about the film’s settings and then we approached father Rajendra for the film. Being a kind-hearted person, he agreed to do it. Since there are no hotels or restaurants, we lived with father Rajendra’s family and shared food with them,” Debashis said.

The toughest part was to make the tribal girls face the camera as they didn’t knew much about TV. But all of them are fantastic hockey players. Though more girls were needed for the movie, the filmmakers got permission to use only 30-40 players for the shoot. Rajendra also made it clear that the girls’ studies should not be hampered. So the shoot used to start from early morning and continued till 9 am only.

Debasis said, “It took us 20 days to complete the shoot. But we faced several hurdles as we are independent and new to this field. It took us almost 3 years to ready the film. We approached several regional and national OTT platforms and we wanted to stream it in Odisha.But the offers were not that encouraging which was quite depressing. After putting in a lot of efforts, we got the opportunity to release it on Disney+ Hotstar with the help of Raj Kishor Hota, Manish Bhushan Mishra and our PR manager Avinash Jaiswal.”

The filmmaker duo wishes to bring a revolution in the Odia entertainment industry. “We have two other documentary films in pipeline and our aim is to make better feature films in the future,” he added.

‘The Mountain Hockey’ can be streamed online for free.

Author: Jyoti Prakash Sahoo

Hailing from the entertainment industry, Jyoti started his career as a cine journalist in 2017. He is an anchor, actor and creative writer too. Currently working as the Content Head of the Odia entertainment YouTube channel 'Mo TV', Jyoti also loves to write human interest and positive stories that can inspire the readers.

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