No producers for National Award winning film on Olympian Vivek Singh

While the three-hour long biopic  based on the ‘flying Sikh’ Milkha Singh has been a blockbuster, another film on another Olympian, Hockey player Vivek Singh, is languishing. And We Play On is a documentary on Singh’s life. Despite winning a National Award, the film has has found no producers in the past year.

And We play On  won the  Swarna Kamal for best non-feature film at the 2012 National Film Awards. However, apart from the Nation Award prize money of Rs 3 lakh, the film has earned nothing so far.

Written, directed and produced by Pramod Purswane, the film tells the story of Singh’s struggle with cancer and how subsequently after his death, his family established a hockey academy for young players in Singh’s hometown of Varanasi. The documentary was made on a budget of Rs 14 lakh.

Singh played 200 international hockey matches for India and also represented the country at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Champions Trophy in Germany in 1989, Lahore World Cup and the Beijing Asian Games in 1990. He achieved all this before the age of 37, when Singh lost his battle with cancer and passed away.

It irks Singh’s family members that the film on his life has seen no interest from buyers.  His younger brother Rahul Singh told DNA , “Yuvraj Singh recovered from cancer. A documentary was made on him, all corporates wanted to buy it and it was showcased to millions on national television. Vivek Singh died of cancer. A documentary was made on him, it won the national award, but no one is interested in releasing it.”

The family members of Singh believe that the problem lies in hockey’s limited popularity as well as our obsession with celebrity. Speaking to DNA, Purswane, the director of the film said, “It takes a Farhan Akhtar to sell Milkha Singh and people remember Bhagat Singh as Ajay Devgn, not the man himself.”

“The problem with this was that it was hockey, not that it was a documentary. It is a very touching story but in the end it is hockey, no one watches it,” he added.

In a bid to get more buyers for the film, Purswane has planned to make another documentary on Ramakant Achrekar who coached Sachin Tendulkar and then club it with the existing documentary on Singh. He hopes that Tendulkar’s name and the popularity of cricket would give the story of the hockey player a buyer and a bigger audience.