Onir

Onir (born Anirban Dhar, 1 May 1969) is an Indian film and TV director, editor, screenwriter and producer. He is best known for his film My Brother…Nikhil, based on the life of Dominic d'Souza, starring Sanjay Suri and Purab Kohli, which was one of the first mainstream Hindi films to deal with AIDS and same-sex relationships.

Onir won the National Award for his film I Am. He has won 16 film awards in total.

Early life
Onir was born as Anirban Dhar in Samchi, Bhutan. His father Aparesh Dhar and mother Manjushree are of Bengali origin. Onir spent much of his childhood going to the cinema. The family moved to Kolkata around 1990.

In Kolkata, Onir studied comparative literature and took a few film classes at Chitrabani film school. He graduated from Jadavpur University in 1989, after which he received a scholarship to study film editing at SFB/TTC in Berlin. He later returned to India and worked as an editor, scriptwriter, art director, music album producer and director before becoming an independent producer and director.

Early career
In 1992 Onir directed and produced his first documentary film, Fallen Hero, based on painter Bijan Choudhury's life. He also served as an assistant to Kalpana Lajmi on Daman: A Victim of Marital Violence (2001), which was his first experience directing a full-length feature film.

While working on a documentary about Dominic D'Souza, a champion swimmer and AIDS patient in Goa, Onir conceived the idea for his first film. His directorial debut My Brother... Nikhil (2005) starring co-producer Sanjay Suri and actress Juhi Chawla, and dealt with the Goan government's harsh treatment of AIDS patients in the 1980s and the stigma attached to them. My Brother... Nikhil was screened at several international film festivals, and Juhi Chawla received an IIFA nomination for her role as the main character's supportive sister. The film was screened at over 40 international film festivals, and won the Audience Choice Awards in Milan, LGBT film festival, Best Film & Jury Audience Choice Award at Montreal, image+nation Film Festival amongst others.

In 2006 he released his second film Bas Ek Pal with Urmila Matondkar, Sanjay Suri and Jimmy Shergill. He received a nomination for the Best Director Critic's Award at the Global Indian Film Awards for the film. This film was not a financial success, only collecting 15–20 percent of its budget at the box office. His next film Sorry Bhai! also failed to do well, as it was released the week of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Critical acclaim
Onir's eighth film was I Am, which consists of four short films exploring themes of single motherhood, displacement, child abuse and same-sex relationships. I Am won the National Award in two categories; Best Film and Best Lyrics. It was also the winnerof I-VIEW 2010s Engendered Award (New York) for Outstanding Contribution.

Onir was awarded the 2008/9 Triangle Media Group Honorary Award on 7 February 2010, and won Best Film awards at both the London Asian Film Festival and the River to River. Florence Indian Film Festival. He won Best Director for Social Concern at the IRDS Film Awards.

2017–present
Together with Sanjay Suri, Onir started Anticlock Films, a production company focused on promoting young directors. Anticlock has promoted Bikas Ranjan Mishra, who directed Chauranga which was released on Netflix India.

He also worked on Raising the Bar - an Indo-Australian documentary about six youth with Down syndrome, which won the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Award.

Onir's fifth film was titled Shab (The Night), and starred Raveena Tandon, Ashish Bisht, Arpia Chatterjee and French actor Simon Frenay. The film was released on 14 July 2017. The film premiered at the New York Indian Film Festival, and also screened at River to River Indian Film Festival Florence and Melbourne Indian Film Festival.

In 2017, a short film that he co-produced called Aaba (Grandfather) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.

In 2017, Onir started shooting his sixth film Kuchh Bheege Alfaaz with Geetanjali Thapa and young Kashmiri actor Zain Khan Durrani. The film released on 16 February 2018. The film won the Audience Choice Award at the Jagaran Film Festival and has been screened at The London Asian Film Festival, Stuttgart Indian Film Festival, Melbourne Indian Film Festival and Karachi International Film Festival.

In 2018, Onir directed the documentary Widows Of Vrindavan, which won Best Documentary at the 2019 Jagran Film Festival. It was also screened at that year's Stuttgart Indian Film Festival and Melbourne Indian Film Festival.

Onir directed the 2021 documentary SAMA: Symbols and Gestures in Contemporary Art of Italy and India, which explores the world of contemporary art in the Indian sub-continent and Italy, and offers a glimpse into the aesthetics of the two regions.

Personal life
Onir has one younger brother, Aryan Dhar. Abhishek Dhar is a theoretical physicist at International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, TIFR Bangalore, adjunct faculty at Raman Research Institute and winner of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology. Onir's sister Irene Dhar Malik is a film and television editor.

Onir is an atheist. He can speak Bengali, Russian, German and Tamil. His favourite film directors are Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel and Andrei Tarkovsky while he cites Shyam Benegal's Junoon as the reason he became a filmmaker. He is also one of the few openly gay directors in Bollywood.