Which Gujarati film won the 70th National Film Award for Best Feature Film promoting national, social and environmental values?

Question

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Correct — C, Kutch Express. The 70th National Film Awards were announced on 16 August 2024 for the best of Indian cinema in 2022, and the winners were felicitated by President Droupadi Murmu at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi on 8 October 2024 — a ceremony originally scheduled for 3 May 2023 and pushed back by more than a year after pandemic-era delays. In that list, the award for Best Feature Film Promoting National, Social and Environmental Values went to Kutch Express, a Gujarati film directed by Viral Shah and produced by Soul Sutra LLP, with a cash prize of Rs 2,00,000 to each of the producer and the director. Set in Bhuj, it follows Monghi, a housewife in a long and unhappy marriage, and the women of her village who close ranks around her — a social-values subject that sits squarely inside what this category exists to reward. Kutch Express was not a one-award film: it took three honours at the 70th, adding Best Actress in a Leading Role for Manasi Parekh, shared with Nithya Menen for the Tamil film Thiruchitrambalam, and Best Costume Design for Niki Joshi. One naming point matters for revision, because it explains the stem's unusually long wording. This category used to carry a personal name — it was the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration. Ahead of this cycle the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting dropped personal names from National Film Award category titles, and the category was recast with the descriptive phrase BPSC quotes verbatim. Note also what Kutch Express did NOT win: the Swarna Kamal for Best Feature Film at the 70th went to Aattam, a Malayalam film directed by Anand Ekarshi.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The strongest wrong answer, and the one a well-read candidate picks — because Hellaro won a bigger award, not a smaller one. Abhishek Shah's 2019 directorial debut, about a group of women in the Rann of Kutch in 1975, won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film at the 66th National Film Awards, the first Gujarati film ever to take the Swarna Kamal, and its thirteen actresses shared a Special Jury Award. Wrong edition by four cycles and wrong category.  (b) Pan Nalin's Chhello Show, released internationally as Last Film Show, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on 10 June 2021 and reached Indian theatres on 14 October 2022. It is best remembered as India's official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards. Its National Film Awards came at the 69th edition, announced in August 2023 — Best Feature Film in Gujarati and Best Child Artist for Bhavin Rabari. Again the right language, the wrong edition and the wrong category.  (d) The category awards a single title per cycle, and for the 70th that title is Kutch Express alone. Hellaro and Chhello Show are both genuine National Film Award winners, which is what makes this option tempting — but they won at the 66th and 69th editions respectively and in entirely different categories. Two films cannot share one edition of this award, so (d) is arithmetically ruled out before any recall is needed.

Concept: The National Film Awards are India's highest film honours, instituted in 1954 and conferred by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting; the festival and awards machinery is now run by the National Film Development Corporation of India, which took over the functions previously handled by the Directorate of Film Festivals. The awards run in three streams — Feature Films, Non-Feature Films and Best Writing on Cinema — and are decided by juries appointed for each cycle. The top prize in each stream is a Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus) and the category awards are Rajat Kamals (Silver Lotus), each carrying a cash component. The Dadasaheb Phalke Award for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema is announced and presented alongside them; at the 70th it went to Mithun Chakraborty. Crucially, the awards recognise regional-language cinema on the same national stage as Hindi cinema, through both language-specific categories (Best Feature Film in Gujarati, in Assamese, in Odia, and so on) and pan-Indian thematic categories such as the one in this question. That design is why a Gujarati film with a modest release footprint can appear in a national awards list next to a Kannada blockbuster: at the 70th, Rishab Shetty won Best Actor for Kantara and Ponniyin Selvan: I took the most awards with four, while Kutch Express took three.

State PCS 2025 Q29 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q29 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer