Shaakuntalam bags four awards at Cannes after NYIFF honors

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The mythological Indian film, Shaakuntalam, bagged four prestigious awards at the 2023 Cannes World Film Festival. Though a commercial and critical failure in India, despite a pan-Indian release, Shaakuntalam managed to get international acclaim and bagged ‘Best Foreign Film,’ ‘Best Costume Design,’ ‘Best Fantasy Film’ and ‘Best Indian Film.’

And just to clarify at the outset: Cannes 2023 or Festival de Cannes has been the talk of the town since the festival began two weeks ago, with multiple Indian celebrities walking the red carpet and attending movie screenings. But the Cannes World Film Festival is not to be confused as the Festival de Cannes.

Directed by Gunasekhar and starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu, the Neelima Guna and Hanshita Reddy production, Shaakuntalam is also now streaming on Amazon Prime. The film was released, as is frequent nowadays, in five languages— Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Hindi. It tells the saga of the well-known mythological and mythical romance, immortalized by the renowned poet Kalidas in literature and stage.

Shaakuntalam won the ‘Best Fantasy Film’ and ‘Best Musical Film’ just last week (May 25) at the New York International Film Festival as well.

An ecstatic Samantha took to her Instagram to thank everyone for the accolades and awards. In a converse situation, early this month, producer Dil Raju had called the film “My biggest failure” as it suffered a loss of Rs. 22 crore for him in an interview for “On Manorama.”

The film also starred Dev Mohan, Ananya Nagalla, Mohan Babu and Allu Arha. Mani Sharma scored music.