Satya (film)

Satya (lit. "Truth") is a 1998 Indian Hindi crime film written and directed by Ram Gopal Varma, with screenplay-dialogues by Saurabh Shukla and Anurag Kashyap.

The film stars J. D. Chakravarthy, Manoj Bajpai, Urmila Matondkar and Shefali Shah. The first film of the Indian Gangster Trilogy, tells the story of Satya, an immigrant who comes to Mumbai seeking his fortune but instead gets sucked into the Mumbai underworld. The film was show cased among the Indian panorama section, at the 1998 International Film Festival of India, the Fribourg International Film Festival, Switzerland, and the New York Asian Film Festival. The film was listed among CNN-IBN's 100 greatest Indian films of all time. In 2005, Indiatimes Movies included Satya in its list of 25 Must See Bollywood Movies.

Made on a shoestring budget of INR 20 millionSatya became a surprise hit at the box office of 1998. The film went on to win six Filmfare Awards, including the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Movie, four Star Screen Awards and Bollywood Movie Award – Best Director. Satya has been referred to as a modern masterpiece and it was considered one of the best films of the 1990s. It is also considered one of the best gangster films of all time. Film critic Rajeev Masand has labeled it (along with its sequel Company) one of the "most influential movies of the past ten years." The film marked the introduction of a new genre of film making, a variation of film noir that has been called Mumbai noir, of which Varma is the acknowledged master.