Quick Facts
Biography
Ashoke Viswanathan (also Asoke, born in 1959) is a Bengali Indian filmmaker and theatre personality, based in Kolkata, India.
Early life
Viswanathan is the son of actor N. Viswanathan. He is a mathematics graduate from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata, and a graduate in film direction from the Film and Television Institute of India.
Career
Viswanathan is currently Professor and Head of Department of Producing For Film and TV specialisation at Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute and an occasional lecturer at Jadavpur University.
He has made award winning features and also documentaries, such as 2014s "The Lighthouse, The Ocean and The Sea", an exploration of the intellectual relationships among Rabindranath Tagore, Romain Rolland and Kalidas Nag. Two of Viswanathan's films have won national awards: his debut film "Shunya Theke Shuru" and "Kichu Sanglap Kichu Prolap"
He has also directed commercial films like "Sesh Sanghat" starring mainstream actors like Jaya Prada and Jackie Shroff and "Gumshuda", in Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil ("Vaira Kolaigal"), a whodunit based on Sherlock Holmes, targeted at a mass audience.
He has served as the Chairperson of the Jury for non-feature films for the National Film Awards.
Three of his feature films and two of his short features have been included in the INDIAN PANORAMA sections of IFFI '94, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2005. His films have been shown at the Commonwealth Film Festival, Manchester, the Pyongyang International Film Festival, the Dhaka International Film Festival, and the Ipswich Film Festival, among others.
Viswanathan has represented India at the Cambridge Seminar on contemporary British writing, held at Downing College, Cambridge (1997).
Awards
- Indira Gandhi Award for Best First Film of a Director, 1993, for "Shunya Theke Shuru".
- National Film Award – Special Jury Award, 1998, for "Kichu Sanglap Kichu Prolap".