The Gujarat State Film Awards are given by the Government of Gujarat through its Information and Broadcasting Department, not by the national jury, and they are fixed by a written government order signed in the name of the Governor of Gujarat on the recommendation of a Film Selection Committee. The 2019 round covered films shown in cinemas between 1 January and 31 December 2019, ran to 46 separate prize lines with cash purses from Rs 21,000 to Rs 2,50,000, and was signed out on 17 March 2021. Hellaro took 17 of those 46 lines and Chaal Jeevi Laiye took 11. Eight lines were left empty because the committee selected nobody. Premji: Rise of a Warrior, directed by Vijaygiri Bava, took ten state awards for 2015 including Best Film and Best Director, and Love Is Blind holds the highest single reported count at eleven.
There are two award systems in Gujarati cinema and almost nobody separates them. The National Film Awards come from a central jury in Delhi and get press releases. The Gujarat State Film Awards come from the state's own Information and Broadcasting Department, arrive as a numbered government resolution in Gujarati, and get a photo of a cheque handover. One of the two is a headline. The other is where the working money is, and it is the one nobody has ever laid out properly in English.
So this page starts from the paper. The 2019 round exists as a scanned order, resolution number FLM/102018/357/A, dated 17 March 2021, listing 46 numbered prize lines, the winner against each, and the exact rupee amount attached. Read it and the system stops being a rumour. Best Film pays Rs 2,50,000 to the producer and the same again to the director. Best Actor pays Rs 75,000. A category with no worthy entry simply says nobody was selected, and in 2019 that happened eight times. The rest of this list is built out from that document and from the winners that other rounds left a verifiable trace of, which is a much shorter list than the industry's own memory suggests.
The list at a glance
| Name | Award | Film | Round (year of exhibition) | Verified from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premji: Rise of a Warrior | Best Film, plus nine more | Premji: Rise of a Warrior | 2015 | Wikipedia film and director articles |
| Chaal Jeevi Laiye! | Second Best Film, Best Popular Film, nine more lines | Chaal Jeevi Laiye! | 2019 | Government of Gujarat order, 17 March 2021 |
| Dariya Chhoru | Best Film, Best Director, both acting awards, nine in total | Dariya Chhoru | 1999 | Screen, 28 July 2000, via Wikipedia |
| Love Is Blind | Best Film and Best Director, eleven awards in total | Love Is Blind | 2005 and 2006 rounds | Wikipedia film article |
| Maiyar Ma Mandu Nathi Lagtu | Nine state awards including Best Film and Best Director | Maiyar Ma Mandu Nathi Lagtu | 2001 | Wikipedia film article, with a live contradiction noted |
| Divaswapna | Best Popular Film of the Year and Second Best Feature Film, five in total | Divaswapna | ceremony reported March 2024 | The Times of India and Ahmedabad Mirror, March 2024 |
| Aarohi Patel | Best Actress, Rs 75,000 | Chaal Jeevi Laiye! | 2019 | Government of Gujarat order, 17 March 2021 |
| Siddharth Randeria | Best Actor, Rs 75,000 | Chaal Jeevi Laiye! | 2019 | Government of Gujarat order, 17 March 2021 |
| Kinjal Rajpriya | Best Actress | Kem Chho? | 2020 | The Times of India, August 2023 |
| Shefali Shah | Best Actress | Dariya Chhoru | 1999 | Screen, 28 July 2000, via Wikipedia |
| Neil Bhatt | Best Actor Debut, jury, and Best Choreographer | Bhanwar | not stated in the source | Wikipedia biography |
| Asha Parekh | Best Actress | Akhand Saubhagyavati | 1963 | The Hit Girl, Om Books International, 2017 |
| Divyang Thakkar | Best Actor | Kevi Rite Jaish | 2012 | Wikipedia biography |
| Vipul Mehta | Five prize lines, including Second Best Direction and Best Screenplay | Chaal Jeevi Laiye! | 2019 | Government of Gujarat order, 17 March 2021 |
| Saumya Joshi | Best Dialogue and Best Lyrics | Hellaro | 2019 | Government of Gujarat order, 17 March 2021 |
| Aditya Gadhvi | Best Playback Singer, Rs 51,000 | Hellaro | 2019 | Government of Gujarat order, 17 March 2021 |
| Aishwarya Majmudar | Best Playback Singer three times, and Second Best in 2019 | Montu Ni Bittu for the 2019 line | 2019 and three earlier rounds | Government of Gujarat order and The Times of India, 2018 |
| Suman Kalyanpur | Best Female Playback Singer, four years running | not itemised in the source | 1970 to 1973 | Press Information Bureau, via Wikipedia |
| Vani Jairam | Best Female Playback Singer | Ghoongat | 1972 | Wikipedia biography |
| Sadhana Sargam | Four Gujarat State Film Awards | not itemised in the source | not stated in the source | Wikipedia biography |
How this list was built
The spine of this page is a primary source rather than a summary: the scanned Government of Gujarat order for the 2019 round, resolution FLM/102018/357/A of the Information and Broadcasting Department, dated 17 March 2021, which names all 46 prize lines, every winner and every cash amount. Everything taken from it is read directly off that document. Everything else comes from English Wikipedia film and biography articles and the newspaper reports they cite, chiefly Screen, The Times of India, Ahmedabad Mirror, Gujarati Mid-day and The Indian Express, each cross-checked against a second page before it was written down. Be warned that the public record on this award is thin and lumpy. There is no complete published winners table for any year before 2019 in English, no official archive of past rounds online, and several claims survive only in one newspaper sentence with no category list behind them. Where a source gives only a count and no breakdown, this page gives the count and says so. One live contradiction is left visible rather than smoothed over: the article on Maiyar Ma Mandu Nathi Lagtu says the film won nine state awards plus two festival awards for eleven in total, while the Hiten Kumar biography and the Gujarati cinema article both say it won eleven of the state awards, and no source reconciles them. Entries were dropped for one reason, the photo rule this site runs on, which is no free-licensed Wikimedia Commons photograph and no scrape-verified Instagram account means no entry. That removed Avinash Vyas, who is reported to have won the state film award for lyrics and music twenty five times and who has no Commons photograph at all; Ramesh Parekh, twice Best Lyricist, whose only Commons file is a scan of his signature; Bhoomi Trivedi and Jigardan Gadhvi, both 2019 playback winners; Maulik Nayak and the thirteen women who took the 2019 special jury prizes; Hiten Kumar; Arun Bhatt, whose eleven-award claim for Lakhtar Ni Laadi carries a citation-needed tag; and Pinky Parikh, whose Best Actress line for Mann, Moti 'Ne Kaach carries the same tag. One Commons file was rejected on identity grounds rather than licence: a photograph filed under the name Manish Saini turned out to be a self-uploaded portrait by a different person of that name, not the Gujarati director. Films with no photograph of the film itself are illustrated with a Commons photo of a verified key person from that film, named in the alt text.
The films that swept
Because the Gujarat list splits Best Film into a producer prize and a director prize, and then repeats that split across popular film, children's film and women's empowerment categories, a strong film can walk away with double figures. Six that did.
1Premji: Rise of a Warrior
A boy from a Kutchi village arrives in Ahmedabad carrying a dead father and no idea who he is, and spends the film finding out. Vijaygiri Bava wrote and directed it as his first feature, his wife Twinkle produced it, and the 2015 state round handed it ten awards including Best Film, Best Director for Bava, Best Actor for Mehul Solanki and Best Story and Screenplay. It reached Gujarat cinemas on 10 July 2015 and a re-edited version opened in Mumbai on 31 March 2017, which is unusual: most Gujarati films do not get a second theatrical life two years later.
Ten awards for a debut is the loudest thing on this page, and it is worth saying why it was possible. The state list is structurally generous to a single strong film, because the same title can win Best Film as a producer prize and again as a director prize, then take Best Direction separately, then take the popular or women's empowerment slot on top. Bava used the platform properly rather than cashing it. He went on to make Montu Ni Bittu in 2019, 21mu Tiffin in 2021 and the historical drama Kasoombo in 2024, and Aarohi Patel, playing Pavan here in her first film, went on to take the Best Actress award in the 2019 round.
Photo: Imfarhad7, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2Chaal Jeevi Laiye!
A father and son take a road trip and the father is dying, which sounds like a small film and turned into one of the highest-grossing Gujarati releases ever made, with a reported gross above Rs 50 crore. In the 2019 state round it took eleven of the 46 prize lines: Second Best Film and Second Best Film Director, both halves of Best Popular Film, Second Best Direction, Best Actor for Siddharth Randeria, Best Actress for Aarohi Patel, Second Best Playback Singer for Jigardan Gadhvi singing Chandane Kaho, Best Story and Best Screenplay for Vipul Mehta, and Best Costume Design for Jia Bhagia and Mallika Chauhan.
The pattern in that haul is the whole argument about the state award. It won every category that measures reach and none of the categories that measure ambition. Hellaro took Best Film, Best Direction, the women's empowerment slot and every craft award that year, while Chaal Jeevi Laiye took the popular film prize, the acting prizes and second place at everything else. Two films, one round, one committee, and a completely legible verdict about what each one was for. The film later ran long enough to enter its eighth year in cinemas on 1 February 2026 and was remade in Marathi as Ole Aale in 2024.
Photo: Hardycsh1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
3Dariya Chhoru
A poor man and a rich woman on the Saurashtra coast, directed by Vipul Amrutlal Shah before he became a Hindi film name, starring Jamnadas Majethia and Shefali Shah before either of them was famous outside Gujarat. It took nine state awards, and it took them across the board: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor for Majethia and Best Actress for Shah. Screen reported the result on 28 July 2000 under the headline that Dariya Chhoru was the best film.
Two things make this the most consequential entry in the pre-revival stretch. Shah and Shefali Shah married after the film, which turns the credit into a piece of industry history rather than a filmography line. And it is the last big state sweep before Gujarati cinema fell into its worst decade, when output dropped to fewer than twenty films a year and the state award was being handed to films almost nobody outside the state ever saw. The award kept running through that. The industry it was awarding almost did not.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
4Love Is Blind
A blind violin player and a writer, directed by Vipul Sharma, and the first Gujarati film ever released into multiplexes, which in 2005 was a genuinely radical piece of distribution rather than a marketing line. It won eleven Gujarat State Film Awards spread across the 2005 and 2006 rounds, including Best Film and Best Director, which is the highest single-film count anyone reports for this award.
Hold that eleven loosely. No source publishes the category breakdown, only the total, and the fact that the wins land across two rounds suggests the film qualified for different lists in different years rather than sweeping one. That is exactly the kind of claim this page exists to mark honestly: the count is repeated in multiple places and is almost certainly right, and the itemised list behind it has never been put online. Sonali Kulkarni, making her Gujarati debut here, later turned up in The Good Road, the first Gujarati film India sent to the Oscars.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
5Maiyar Ma Mandu Nathi Lagtu
Jashwant Gangani wrote, produced and directed a rom-com family drama that stayed in theatres for fifty two weeks and turned into a cult title, and it won nine Gujarat State Film Awards including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor. It was re-released twenty five years later, which almost no Gujarati film from that era can claim. Gangani later took a Dada Saheb Phalke Academy Award, reported by The Indian Express in May 2011.
This is also the entry where the record openly contradicts itself, and the honest thing is to show you rather than pick. The film's own article says nine state awards plus two other festival awards, totalling eleven that year. The biography of its lead actor Hiten Kumar and the Gujarati cinema article both say the film won eleven of the Gujarat State Film Awards outright. The two readings differ by whether the last two trophies came from the state or from a festival, and no source anywhere reconciles them, so this page counts nine state awards and tells you the dispute exists.
Photo: Annki777, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
6Divaswapna
An adaptation of Gijubhai Badheka's Divaswapna, the book every Gujarati teacher training course still assigns, about a teacher who throws out the syllabus and tries to actually reach a classroom. Satish Davara directed, Naresh Prajapati produced under K. D. Films, and it took five prizes at the state ceremony reported in March 2024, including Best Popular Film of the Year and Second Best Feature Film, with Best Supporting Actor going to Chetan Daiya and Best Song of the Year to Parth Oza.
That the reporting names only four of the five is typical of how this award is covered. Times of India and Ahmedabad Mirror both carried the story in March 2024, both led with the number five, and neither printed the full list. It is also the single clearest evidence that the state committee is not simply mirroring commercial performance: a film adapted from a hundred-year-old education text, made by a first-time feature director, beat the year's noisier releases in a category literally named Best Popular Film.
Photo: VISHAL JOSHI, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The actors
Best Actor and Best Actress each carry Rs 75,000 in the current schedule, which is less than a decent week of shooting and considerably more than most Gujarati performers had ever been officially told they were worth.
7Aarohi Patel
Line 19 of the 2019 government order reads Best Actress, Ku. Aarohi Patel, Chaal Jeevi Laiye, Rs 75,000. That is the entire citation, and it is enough. She plays the woman the road trip collides with, in a film built around Siddharth Randeria's dying father, and holding the screen against a stage giant in his own vehicle is the reason her name is on that line.
Her career is unusually neatly bracketed by this award. She debuted in Premji: Rise of a Warrior, the film that took ten state awards for the 2015 round, was in Montu Ni Bittu when it took three lines in the same 2019 order she won her own on, and has since carried Love Ni Bhavai and Aum Mangalam Singlem. Three state-award films in the first four years of a career is not luck. It is a performer the committee kept finding in the room.
Photo: Farhad Shaikh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
8Siddharth Randeria
Randeria came to the 2019 state award from the stage, not from cinema, and that is the point of the win. He built Gujjubhai into a character the whole state knows across decades of Gujarati theatre and then carried it into films, which is a translation most stage actors never manage because the size that works in a hall reads as shouting on a screen. In Chaal Jeevi Laiye he plays a man who has decided how he wants to die, and the performance is quieter than anything the Gujjubhai brand would lead you to expect.
The award is worth Rs 75,000, which tells you something honest about the scale of this prize. Randeria could earn that in a single night of full-house theatre. What the state award gives instead is a line in a government order signed in the name of the Governor of Gujarat, and for a business that spent thirty years being treated as an embarrassment by its own state, official recognition on paper was the scarcer commodity.
Photo: Nizil Shah, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
9Kinjal Rajpriya
She plays Morani in Kem Chho?, a family drama directed by Vipul Sharma that reached cinemas on 17 January 2020, and the state committee gave her Best Actress for the 2020 round. Note the two dates: the film opened in January 2020, and the win was still being reported as news in August 2023. Three and a half years between the performance and the announcement, and the announcement is the first time most people heard the film had been in contention at all.
Rajpriya came out of Chhello Divas in 2015, the college comedy that pulled a generation of Gujarati actors into the industry at once, and has worked steadily since through Short Circuit, Saheb, Nava Pappa and Var Padharavo Saavdhan, the first Gujarati film dubbed into Kannada. Her director on Kem Chho?, Vipul Sharma, is the same man who made Love Is Blind, the eleven-award winner two entries above. Small industry.
Photo: Dabhianil8, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
10Shefali Shah
Before Delhi Crime, before Monsoon Wedding, before any of the work that made her one of the most respected actors in India, Shefali Shah won Best Actress at the Gujarat State Film Awards for a Gujarati film about a fishing coast. Dariya Chhoru was made by Vipul Amrutlal Shah, whom she later married, and it took nine state awards with hers among them.
It is easy to file this as trivia and it is not. Gujarati cinema in 1999 had no pipeline to anywhere, no festival route, no streaming, no crossover. A state award was the ceiling of what a Gujarati performance could be given. That the person holding that award went on to a national career is the earliest working example of the thing Gujarati cinema now takes for granted, which is that its own films can be a starting line rather than a dead end.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
11Neil Bhatt
Bhanwar is a film about a folk puppeteer in modern Gujarat, it won six Gujarat State Awards, and Neil Bhatt took two of them in the same round: Best Actor Debut on the jury's citation, and Best Choreographer, because he choreographed the songs in the film he was starring in. Winning an acting prize and a craft prize for the same title in one round is rare on any list.
He then did the thing the state award cannot pay for and left. Bhatt built a national profile on Hindi television, in Roop, Ghum Hai Kisikey Pyaar Meiin and Gulaal, and is now far better known for that than for the Gujarati film that gave him his first two trophies. Neither Wikipedia nor the newspapers give a year for the Bhanwar round, which is a good small illustration of how loosely this award is documented: a two-time state winner, and no published date attached to either win.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
12Asha Parekh
The oldest verified individual win on this page, and it comes from the winner's own book rather than from a government archive, because no online record of the 1963 round exists. Asha Parekh lists it first in the chronological awards section of The Hit Girl: won, Gujarat State Award for Best Actress, for Akhand Saubhagyavati, 1963. Everything after it on her list is Filmfare, Padma Shri and eventually the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
Gujarat had existed as a state for three years when she won it. The award she took was therefore among the first the new state ever gave for cinema, handed to a Bombay-based star for a Gujarati film, at a moment when Gujarati cinema was producing perhaps a handful of features a year. Sixty years later the same category was worth Rs 75,000 and a numbered line in a resolution. The prize has become bureaucratic. In 1963 it was closer to a statement of intent.
Photo: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons.
13Divyang Thakkar
Kevi Rite Jaish is the film every account of modern Gujarati cinema starts from, a satire about Patels obsessed with getting to America and into the motel business, and Divyang Thakkar carried it. The state committee gave him Best Actor for the performance, which makes him the first individual winner of the revival era rather than the last of the old one.
What he did next is the more interesting half. He reunited with director Abhishek Jain for Bey Yaar in 2014, then moved behind the camera entirely and wrote and directed Jayeshbhai Jordaar for Yash Raj Films in 2022, with Ranveer Singh playing a Gujarati man standing up to his own family over a female foetus. A Gujarati state acting award to a Yash Raj directing credit in ten years is not a route anybody had before 2012.
Instagram: @divyangt (verified 2026-07-29).
Writing, direction, music
The 2019 order splits Best Screenplay into three separate prizes for story, screenplay and dialogue, and splits music direction into song and background score. That granularity is why craft names show up on the state list who would never appear on a national one.
14Vipul Mehta
Five separate numbered lines of the 2019 government order carry the same name. Vipul Mehta took Second Best Film Director at Rs 1,25,000, Best Popular Film Director at Rs 2,50,000, Second Best Direction at Rs 1,50,000, Best Story at Rs 51,000 and Best Screenplay at another Rs 51,000, all for Chaal Jeevi Laiye. Add them and one man walked out of a single round with Rs 5,52,000 of state prize money, more than any other individual on the list that year.
The reason is structural rather than sentimental. Because the state list awards popular film and best film as separate categories, and awards the producer and the director separately within each, a writer-director of a commercial hit collects the same achievement several times over. It is a quirk worth knowing before anyone quotes a state award count at you. Mehta then took the film across the language barrier himself, remaking it in Marathi as Ole Aale with Nana Patekar in 2024.
Photo: Editorharpsweetrolls, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
15Saumya Joshi
Two lines of the 2019 order, numbers 33 and 36, both read Saumya Joshi. One is the dialogue writer prize under Best Screenplay. The other is Best Lyrics, for Asvaar. Writing the words the characters speak and the words they sing, in the same film, and being paid Rs 51,000 for each, is about as complete a description of what a writer does as an award list can manage.
Joshi came to Hellaro from the Gujarati stage, where he is one of the few contemporary playwrights whose name sells a ticket on its own, with plays including Welcome Zindagi and 102 Not Out, the latter of which became a Hindi film with Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor. The verse in Hellaro is doing structural work rather than decoration: the film is about women who are forbidden to dance, so the lyrics carry what the dialogue is not allowed to say.
Photo: Gujarat Vishw Kosh Trust, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
16Aditya Gadhvi
Line 23 of the order: Best Playback Singer, Shri Aditya Gadhvi, Hellaro, for Sapna Vinani Raat, Rs 51,000. Line 25 gives second place to Jigardan Gadhvi for Chandane Kaho from Chaal Jeevi Laiye at Rs 21,000. The gap between first and second in this category is Rs 30,000, which is the sort of detail that only exists because the state publishes its prize schedule and the national awards do not.
Gadhvi came up through Gujarati folk and has since become one of the biggest live draws in the state, which is the usual route here: playback in Gujarati cinema is not a separate profession from the folk and garba circuit, it is the same singers moving between a recording booth and a ground with ten thousand people in it. Bhoomi Trivedi took the equivalent women's prize the same year for Vagyo Re Dhol, also from Hellaro.
Photo: Imfarhad7, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
17Aishwarya Majmudar
Three Gujarat State Awards for Best Playback Singer, which is more than anyone else currently working, plus a fourth line in the 2019 order at second place for Rangdariyo from Montu Ni Bittu. She told The Times of India in April 2018 that she was honoured to win the state award, which is the closest thing to a primary quote this category has produced.
The state award is not what her career runs on and that is the useful part. Majmudar fronts Rangtaali, one of the biggest ticketed garba properties in Gujarat, and her singing reaches more people in nine nights of Navratri than most Gujarati films reach in a run. The award functions as official confirmation of something the audience had already settled. That gap, between what the state certifies and what the state already knows, runs through this entire list.
Instagram: @aishwarya_tm (verified 2026-07-29).
18Suman Kalyanpur
Four consecutive years, 1970 through 1973, is the longest verified streak anybody holds in any category of this award. Suman Kalyanpur took Best Female Playback Singer from the Government of Gujarat in each of those rounds, at a point when Gujarati cinema was producing enough musicals a year for a category like that to be genuinely competitive.
She spent her Hindi career being compared to Lata Mangeshkar, which is both the reason people know her voice and the reason her own name is smaller than her work. Gujarat gave her four consecutive state awards while that argument was happening in Bombay. She was given the Lata Mangeshkar Award for lifetime achievement in 2009, and the Padma Bhushan in 2023, presented by President Droupadi Murmu, which is where the photograph on this entry comes from.
Photo: President's Secretariat, GODL-India, via Wikimedia Commons.
19Vani Jairam
Her Wikipedia biography lists state awards in a single block, and Gujarat comes first: 1972, Gujarat State Film Award for Best Female Playback Singer, for Ghoongat. Tamil Nadu followed in 1979, Odisha in 1982. Gujarat was the first state to formally recognise a singer who went on to record in roughly nineteen languages and take three National Film Awards.
The 1972 date matters against the entry above it. Suman Kalyanpur was in the middle of a four-year run in this same category when Jairam took it, which means the Gujarat committee was handing this prize back and forth between two of the most technically serious voices in the country at a time when Gujarati cinema was still routinely described as a rural product for a rural audience. The music was never the weak part.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
20Sadhana Sargam
Four Gujarat State Film Awards, which is more than she has from her own home state of Maharashtra, where she has three. Add one from Orissa and one National Film Award and you have a singer whose trophy cabinet is arranged by geography rather than by year. She has recorded in more than thirty five languages.
This entry is here with an honest asterisk. The four is repeated across her biography and the list of songs she has recorded, and no source anywhere itemises which four rounds, which four films or which four songs. That is the state of the record for this award in a sentence: a singer with a National Film Award has four Gujarat state prizes that cannot be dated, because nobody has ever put the winners tables online.
Photo: Bollywood Hungama, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
What the numbers say
The 2019 Gujarat State Film Awards: how 46 prize lines were split
Counted line by line off the Government of Gujarat order for the 2019 round, resolution FLM/102018/357/A, dated 17 March 2021. Producer and director halves of the same category are counted as two lines because the order pays them separately. Two lines belong to one further 2019 release whose title the scanned order renders illegibly, so it is left unnamed here rather than guessed at.
Questions people actually ask
What are the Gujarat State Film Awards?
They are cash prizes and citations given by the Government of Gujarat to Gujarati films and film workers, administered by the Information and Broadcasting Department with applications invited by the Directorate of Information. Winners are chosen by a Film Selection Committee and then fixed in a numbered government resolution signed in the name of the Governor of Gujarat. They are entirely separate from the National Film Awards, which are decided by a central jury in Delhi.
Which Gujarati film has won the most Gujarat State Film Awards?
Hellaro took 17 of the 46 prize lines in the 2019 round, which is the highest count that can be checked against a published government order. Love Is Blind is reported to have won eleven across the 2005 and 2006 rounds and Premji: Rise of a Warrior took ten for 2015, but neither of those totals has an itemised category list published anywhere.
Why does the year on a Gujarat State Film Award not match the ceremony?
Because the round is defined by the calendar year in which a film was shown in cinemas, not by when the government gets round to signing it off. The 2019 round covered films exhibited between 1 January and 31 December 2019 and was ordered on 17 March 2021. The 2020 round was still being reported as news in August 2023. On this page the year always means the exhibition year the round covers.
How much prize money comes with a Gujarat State Film Award?
The 2019 schedule paid Rs 2,50,000 each to the producer and the director of the Best Film, Rs 1,50,000 for Second Best Direction, Rs 75,000 each for Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Art Direction, Rs 51,000 for most craft categories including cinematography, editing, dialogue, lyrics, music direction, costume and makeup, and Rs 21,000 for second place in the playback singing categories.
Are the Gujarat State Film Awards the same as the National Film Awards?
No. They are different juries, different money and different rules, and a film can win one without ever being considered for the other. Hellaro is the clearest case: it won Best Feature Film at the 66th National Film Awards in Delhi and separately took 17 of 46 prize lines in Gujarat's own 2019 state round. The state list also has categories the national list does not, such as Best Popular Film and Best Film on Women's Empowerment.
Sources and image credits
All photographs are free-licensed files from Wikimedia Commons, reused with the attribution each licence requires. No press agency or studio photographs are hosted on this site. Instagram content is linked or embedded from the official account, never re-hosted.
- Government of Gujarat, Information and Broadcasting Department, resolution FLM/102018/357/A dated 17 March 2021, the full prize list for the 2019 round, scanned copy archived at archive.org as Award-2019
- Government of Gujarat, Information and Broadcasting Department, resolution FLM/102018/151/A dated 8 March 2019, publishing the Quality Integrated Incentive Policy for Gujarati Films 2019, cited within the 2021 order
- English Wikipedia film articles for Premji: Rise of a Warrior, Chaal Jeevi Laiye!, Dariya Chhoru, Love Is Blind, Maiyar Ma Mandu Nathi Lagtu, Divaswapna, Kem Chho?, Montu Ni Bittu and Kevi Rite Jaish, retrieved July 2026
- English Wikipedia biographies for Vijaygiri Bava, Vipul Mehta, Satish Davara, Jashwant Gangani, Aarohi Patel, Siddharth Randeria, Kinjal Rajpriya, Shefali Shah, Neil Bhatt, Asha Parekh, Divyang Thakkar, Saumya Joshi, Aditya Gadhvi, Aishwarya Majmudar, Suman Kalyanpur, Vani Jairam and Sadhana Sargam
- Screen, 28 July 2000, Gujarat State Awards announced, Dariya Chhoru is best film, via the Internet Archive
- The Times of India, 21 April 2018, on Aishwarya Majmudar's state award, and August 2023 on the Kem Chho? win at the 2020 state awards
- The Times of India and Ahmedabad Mirror, March 2024, on Divaswapna's five wins at the state ceremony
- Asha Parekh and Khalid Mohammed, The Hit Girl, Om Books International, 2017, page 150
- Press Information Bureau, Government of India, cited for Suman Kalyanpur's four consecutive Gujarat awards
- Wikimedia Commons imageinfo API for every photograph licence, photographer credit and description on this page
- Instagram profile verification via the Apify Instagram scraper, 29 July 2026, for Divyang Thakkar and Aishwarya Majmudar