National Film Award For Best Screenplay - Winners

For powerfully recreating the biography of an actress, for its rare, psychological insights and understanding of human relationships, for the complex integration of theme, style and dramatic situation into an engrossing whole, which provokes the spectator into a new awareness of the predicament of the working woman in Indian society.

For maintaining taunt narrative line without resorting to melodrama and retaining a firm grip on the central idea in an action packed film.

For effectively combining the terse and pithy dialogue with creation of well-defined, lively characters to convey a poignant story which leaves a lasting impression.

For translating the suffering of the people in drought-affected areas into a gripping visual narrative.

For its economy of expression in the treatment of a sensitive theme.

For its rich texture, lyricism and cinematic elegance in its presentation of Shankaracharya as an embodiment of greatness.

For the powerful rendering of the saga of a woman who goea through the revolution against the prevailing social mores and comesto terms with herself.

For its penetrative and sensitive screenplay depicting the trauma faced by an artist in search of his identity in relation to his professional and personal life.

For the precision in structuring a very complex narrative content requiring both exceptional dramatic and literary skills.

For capturing the anguish prevailing among students of professional institutions.

For the gripping plot, clearly etched characterisations and the brilliant portrayal of life in Kerala a few hundred years ago.

For depicting a simplistic story, capturing the various levels of philosophy, psychology, tradition and relationships perfectly.

For its sensitive and poetic treatment of disillusionment of an underprivileged adolescent.

For an extremely well structured script.

For designing and structuring a screenplay from an imaginative and aesthetic angle, with a superb control over the unity of impressions.

For his masterly use of fiction in cinema, reconstructing pre-1940s Kerala through sharply defined characters and remarkable control over dialogue.

For their masterly and sensitive visual narration of a volatile and confused situation of the year 1992 in India with great depth and simplicity of words.

For tightly knit and smooth flowing plot with excellent dialogues and razor-sharp tuning.

For tactfully crafting a sensitive theme that dwells upon an incident which raises issues of social responsibility and personal awareness.

For Hindi film Samar where he has used a unique structure to ekplore the complek contradictions of urban/rural, rich/poor, pcwerful/dcwntrodden in a simple story line laced with poignant Moments of humour and irony for a perceptive insight into contemporary indian life.

For expressing with extreme economy and skilful cinematic treatment a story based on a sensitive screenplay woven around an old couple.

For focusing, in present times of degeneration, on love, sacrifice and family values.

For the film, which seems to probes a real – unreal dramatic situation involving two characters full of emotion and conflicts, with a rare touch of artistic sensitivity.

For its fluid narration of the nuances of an ambiguous relationship in troubled times.

For weaving together the strands of time creating a resonant dialogue between the past and the present.

For telling a complex story in a stunningly simple manner. It takes you into the empty shallow world of Page 3, in a manner which is funny yet deeply empathetic.

For creating a crisp screenplay that is riveting and renders pace to the entire film.

For the original vision with which Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence is given life in popular parlance.

For the imaginative and emotional handling of uncompromisingly steadfast side of the Father of the Nation with special reference to his relationship with his troublesome son.

For its remarkable integration of three different plots using the sense of smell at as a liet motif to focus sensitively on human relationships.

For the mysterious narrative that weaves together multiple perspectives to create a coherent whole, and yet leaves a haunting ambiguity.

For linking the theme of death and its inevitability through a narrative style that presents two versions of the same event, not necessarily in chronological order.

For the conversational quality with its cutting edge wit and life like freshness.

For its kaleidoscopic variety that uses realism, tradition and contemporaneity, soaked in local flavour on an infinite canvas.

For retaining the concerns and values of a biographical account while translating it into the cinematic medium and honouring the essence of the original.

For bringing to life the textures of various characters through articulating their emotion and thought process.

For a charming and utterly professional construct of an engaging middle class urban narrative that neatly delivers the values of compassion, friendship, loyalty, commitment and imagination in the world of children. They use familiar spaces, characters and situations to create an entertaining and surprising fabric of a caring society that still believes in what is good and right.

For the cinematic adaptation of a literary work that encompasses several issues and characters is always a challenging task. He skilfully transforms the descriptive power of the literary text into a cinematic narrative of layered and tender moments. Despite a range of characters and subplots, the screenplay engagingly links the lives of its teenage protagonists to the repressive context of the National Emergency.

For its immensely varied and textured use of language that is both an authentic and an energetic reflection of the different sections of life shown in the film: the language of the village, of politicians, of the scholar and much else. His dialogues – robustly rustic yet influenced by urban vocabulary – is characteristic of the Indian scene today.