Pramod Pati

Cuttack, Orissa, British India [now India]

Pramod Pati was born in Odisha in 1932 and studied there and Bangalore and worked for a few years in the Odisha state government. He was awarded a scholarship to study in Czechoslovakia under the legendary puppet-maker, illustrator, motion-picture animator and film director Jiri Trinka.Emboldened by this experience and a growing artist-driven milieu at the Film Division, he joined the Films Division and put his ideas into practice. While previous Films Division documentaries were narrative-driven and didactic, Pati infused his films with non-narratives storytelling techniques and a broad range of influences from both India and the West.The Films Division of India was started by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the late 1940s. Nehru’s guiding vision in launching it was for it to document the new socialist and scientific India that his government was building. The style of these initial films was of the straight documentary with an obvious message. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Films Divisions’s output moved in a more experimental, artistic direction. At the forefront of this shift was Pramod Pati.