Vidhu Vinod Chopra

Vidhu Vinod Chopra (born 5 September 1952) is an Indian film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. He is the recipient of several accolades, including five National Film Awards and ten Filmfare Awards. He is known for directing films such as the crime drama Parinda (1989), the patriotic romantic drama 1942: A Love Story (1994), the action drama Mission Kashmir (2000) and the biographical drama 12th Fail (2023). He is also known for producing the Munna Bhai film series, 3 Idiots (2009), PK (2014), and Sanju (2018) under his banner Vinod Chopra Films.

Chopra was born and brought up in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India to a Punjabi Hindu family. His father was D. N. Chopra and veteran filmmaker Ramanand Sagar was his half-brother. His brother, Vir K. Chopra, was a scholar of Indian politics and worked as a producer. His parents were originally from Peshawar, British India. His mother was Shanti Devi Mahalakshmi, who left Kashmir, due to the Kashmir conflict in 1990. He dedicated his film Shikara to his mother, which was based on the same. He studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune.

Chopra's first student short film, Murder at Monkey Hill (1976), won the National Film Award for Best Short Experimental Film and the Guru Dutt Memorial Award for Best Student Film.

This was followed by a short documentary highlighting the plight of India's destitute children, called An Encounter with Faces (1976), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film in 1979. It also won the Grand Prix at the Tampere Film Festival in 1980.

Sazaye Maut, his first full-length feature film, was an adaptation of his previous short, Murder at Monkey Hill. It starred Naseeruddin Shah, Radha Saluja and Dilip Dhawan. Vanraj Bhatia composed the music for the film.

He founded his own production company, Vinod Chopra Films, in 1985. Since then, the company has gone on to produce major Bollywood films, and is currently one of the biggest and most successful film production houses in India.

Chopra directed and produced Khamosh, which starred prominent Indian actors such as Shabana Azmi, Amol Palekar, Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapoor, among others. The movie is set in Kashmir and has been praised by critics as an inventive meta thriller.

His next directorial, the crime drama Parinda (1989), proved to be a landmark film in Hindi cinema. It expanded the orbit of the crime drama and the vocabulary of images used in Hindi films while garnering widespread critical acclaim and numerous awards. Several modern Indian filmmakers have expressed their admiration for and drawn inspiration from Chopra's film.