Visuals of a biographical film made on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar are viral as 'rare footage' of him recorded by a British journalist.
The viral footage shows monochrome scenes depicting Savarkar's time spent at the Cellular Jail in Andaman and Nicobar Islands for revolting against the British rule.
BOOM found that the video shows footage from a biographical film Life of Shri Vinayak Damodar Savarkar made on Savarkar. The film has been directed by short filmmaker Prem Vaidya.
The video has been tweeted by a verified handle @rakesh_bstpyp, who according to his bio is a 'newspaper editor and a nationalist writer'. BOOM has earlier fact-checked the user for peddling misinformation.
The video has been tweeted with a caption in Hindi which translates to, "A British journalist has posted a rare video footage of the great patriot Veer Savarkar serving a sentence of Kalapani in the Cellular Jail in Andaman. The video shows the life of that time. Once you watch this rare footage, you will come to know that he was not only a Veer, he was Mahaveer, Paramveer."
(Original Text in Hindi: एक ब्रिटिश पत्रकार ने अंडमान की सेल्युलर जेल में कालापानी की सजा काट रहे महान देशभक्त वीर सावरकर का दुर्लभ वीडियो फुटेज पोस्ट किया है। जो उस समय के जीवन को दिखाता है, आप एक बार यह दुर्लभ फुटेज देखने के बाद पता चलेगा वीर सावरकर जी वीर नही, महावीर परमवीर थे।)
Click here to see an archive of the post.
The same video is viral on Facebook with a similar caption.
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Fact Check
BOOM ran a keyword search related to biographies made on Savarkar on YouTube and found the scenes shown in the viral video in a video uploaded by the verified channel of Ministry of Information & Broadcasting on August 14, 2014. The title of the video is, "Life of Shri Vinayak Damodar Savarkar".
The description section of the video states, "Shri Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a fearless freedom fighter, social reformer, writer, dramatist, poet, historian, political leader and philosopher. Savarkar's thoughts touch upon virtually every aspect of nation-building and are relevant even today. The film depicts various important events in his life."
Visuals of the viral video can be seen in the film from the time stamp between 27:29 and 29:46 minutes. The comparison between the scenes from viral video and the film footages of Ministry of Information & Broadcasting can be seen below.
Taking a cue from this, we further did a keyword search about the film and found that it is a 1983 film on India's revolutionary freedom fighter, Savarkar. The same is listed on Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's website.
A search on Films Division website of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting showed us three films which were made on Savarkar. All the three films were directed by Prem Vaidya. Vaidya received a number of national and international awards as a short film maker. The details of his journey as an assistant cinematographer in the Government of India's Films Division to a director and producer can be read on the Indian Express's report.
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