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Mrityudand ( Death Sentence) is an Indian Hindi drama film released in 1997. It was directed and produced by Prakash Jha and stars Madhuri Dixit, Shabana Azmi, Ayub Khan, Mohan Agashe and Om Puri.
The film is a commentary on social and gender injustice. Hip Hip Hurray to Aarakshan: The best of director Prakash Jha As with his other movies, Jha focuses on the social problems of his native state of Bihar, and Mrityudand straddles the boundary between artistic and commercial films. It includes semi-classical music, tuned by Anand–Milind and Raghunath Seth and worded by Javed Akhtar. The film was critically acclaimed and is considered to be one of Dixit's best performances.
The central characters are a young couple, Vinay (Ayub Khan) and Ketki (Madhuri Dixit). They become involved in the machinations of several powerful and unscrupulous villagers. Foremost among them is contractor Tirpat Singh (Mohan Joshi), a powerful, corrupt and ruthless man who oppresses poor people and especially women with impunity. Vinay becomes influenced by Tirpat, leading to domestic abuse, alcoholism, and a selfishness that alienates his loving wife and tears apart the whole family, despite her best efforts to fight this.
The rest of the movie deals with their efforts to break out of their situation, both within and outside of their relationship, and Vinay's and especially Ketki's bloody struggle to confront and defeat the forces of oppression and male domination in the village. Women to the fore
Mrityudand was invited for the gala premiere at BFI London Film Festival in 1997.
The reviewer for Screen called the film "a superbly crafted web of intrigue that gets darker and murkier till it reaches horrifying proportions of cruelty and ferociousness". Noting it to be "passionate, highly articulate, and never confused", they stated that the film "questions the limited definition of woman merely as a wife or a mother, and goes on to show strong women who define themselves as individuals." The reviewer praised the acting performances as well as Jha's creation of a film which "not only has something to say, but says it well. There are no hysterical histrionics. There is no hypocrisy and false rhetoric which one finds so often in films which profess to be socially progressive for women. The songs are situational and elegant."
| Screen Awards | 4th Screen Awards | Screen Award for Best Actress | Madhuri Dixit | ||
| Screen Award for Best Supporting Actress | Shabana Azmi | ||||
| Screen Award for Best Actor in a Negative Role | Mohan Joshi |
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