Madhur Bhandarkar né le 26 août 1968 dans une famille brahmane, est un réalisateur et scénariste indien de films de Bollywood en hindi. Il est récompensé du prestigieux National Awards. On le connaît pour mettre en évidence le côté sombre de secteurs différents à travers une histoire dans ses films. Par exemple, son film Fashion (2008) dépeint le côté sombre des top models et du business de l'industrie de la mode, et son film Page 3 (2005) révèlent le côté sombre des médias et de la classe supérieure de Mumbai.

Biographie

Career
Madhur Bhandarkar worked in a video cassette library in Khar, a suburb of Mumbai. This gave him access to a large collection of movies and he studied film-making through it.

After trying his skills with small time filmmakers as an assistant, Bhandarkar landed up as an assistant to Ram Gopal Varma. He even played his first cameo in his 1995 film Rangeela where he was the associate director to Ram Gopal Varma. A couple of years later he made his directorial debut with Trishakti which took more than three years to make and released in 1999. The film had a relatively low key cast and was largely ignored at the box office. After two years he directed Chandni Bar (2001) starring Tabu and Atul Kulkarni with a budget of Rs 1.5 crore. The film was critically acclaimed and a box office success, which took Bhandarkar into the top league of filmmakers in Bollywood. He received his first National Award for this film and thereon won National awards for his films Page-3 and Traffic Signal. His Movie Fashion (2008) also won National Awards for Best Actress (Priyanka Chopra) and for Best Supporting Actress (Kangana Ranaut). Three times National Award winning director Madhur Bhandarkar has recently added one more feather to his cap.
Madhur was awarded the Gangasharan Singh Award (2009) by the HRD Ministry of India, this Presidential Award was given to him for his contribution to Hindi Cinema. Madhur was then conferred PL Deshpande Award a.k.a. Zenith Asia Award for significantly shaping the film making culture in his unique works and he has been described as The Film Maker of The First Decade of 21st Century. On the Silver Jubilee Year of Aashay Film Club, this award ceremony took place on 16th Nov at National Film Archive Theatre during 8th ‘Pulotsav – An Art Festival’ in Pune. PL Deshpande was a renowned writer, stage and film actor and his literary works are still revered in Maharashtra and others parts of the world. In his honour, Zenith Asia Award was given to Madhur Bhandarkar and his film Chandni Bar was also screened during the fest amongst landmark 25 films from world cinema.

Also recently, National Film Archive of India (NFAI) which falls under Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India preserved all the films of renowned Indian Film-Maker Madhur Bhandarkar. Chandni Bar, Page-3, Corporate, Traffic Signal, Fashion and Jail, are all the films of the realistic film-maker which will now find space in Government’s Archival data for Indian Films.

The nature of job of National Film Archive of India is to safeguard the heritage of Indian Cinema for posterity and act as a centre for dissemination of a healthy film culture in the country. Promotion of film scholarship and research on various aspects of cinema also form part of its Charter. Familiarizing foreign audiences with Indian Cinema and to make it more visible across the globe is another declared objective of the Archive.


Personal life
Bhandarkar is a school dropout. He came from a middle-class family. As a result, Madhur had to take up various jobs. He worked at a video store as an errand boy and dropped off cassettes to people from many walks of life including dance bar girls and film stars. He also sold chewing gum at traffic signals and worked as an assistant to small time directors for a paltry salary of 7px1000. He also travelled to Muscat where his only sibling, elder sister was based in search of work. At time of his struggle, he travelled by bus and sometimes those who had done bit roles in his films would give him seat only to embarrass him.

He is a great devotee of the Hindu God Siddhivinayak and has been walking from his house in Khar, Mumbai to the temple for the past 16 years on every Tuesday. According to him, the film Corporate was his most difficult film as people in corporate world would shun him after he bared Page 3 culture in his earlier film. He took inspiration for Corporate from the Coke - Pepsi controversy. He has been invited to deliver lectures on corporate issues to management students after the release of Corporate. (Interview to TV channel IBN Lokmat on 26 November 2008) Bhandarkar married his girlfriend Renu Namboodiri on 15 December 2003 in Mumbai. They have a daughter named Siddhi.