Nana Patekar’s Parinda: 5 Filmfare Wins and a Hollywood Remake

Nana Patekar’s Parinda is being remembered as a Bollywood landmark for two reasons: the awards it collected in 1989 and the road it later took to Hollywood.

Directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, the Hindi crime thriller won five Filmfare awards. Jackie Shroff was named Best Actor, Patekar won Best Supporting Actor, Chopra took Best Director, Shivkumar Subramaniam won Best Screenplay and Renu Saluja won Best Editor. Patekar also received a National Award for his performance as Anna.

A rare crossover

Hollywood has looked to Indian cinema before, but those projects have usually landed in the hands of foreign directors. Broken Horses, the English-language remake of Parinda, broke that pattern.

Chopra directed the remake himself. In an interview, he said:

We wanted to make an English film of our own movie.

The story stayed close to the original, with small changes to the twists and character notes.

Anna becomes Julius Hench

Patekar’s Anna was a live wire: volatile, ruthless and impossible to read. In Broken Horses, Vincent D’Onofrio’s Julius Hench ran the same world with a quieter, more composed menace.

Parinda itself was loosely inspired by the 1954 Hollywood classic On the Waterfront, though the two films diverged sharply in character progression and narrative outcome.

For fans revisiting the film now, the essential contrasts are:

• Parinda won five Filmfare trophies in 1989; Patekar added a National Award.
• Broken Horses kept the narrative spine but adjusted specific twists.
• The gangster shifted from Anna’s volatility to Julius Hench’s cold control.

A legend’s last bow

Nana Patekar died on October 8, 2026, after suffering a cardiac arrest. He will last be seen in the horror-comedy Shakti Shalini, directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and featuring Aneet Padda.

The news has refocused attention on Parinda, the film that made Anna one of Hindi cinema’s most memorable gangsters.

Source: Filmfare