Over 200 eminent filmmakers, many of them National Award winners, petitioned President Pranab Mukherjee, seeking his intervention in a bid to end the deadlock crippling the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) even as the students' indefinite agitation entered its 89th day.

In a letter addressed to Mr. Mukherjee on Tuesday, filmmakers implored the President to use his good offices to facilitate a resolution of the crisis spurred on by the controversial appointments of little-known TV actor-turned-BJP leader Gajendra Chauhan as FTII Chairman and four Sangh Parivar propagandists to the institute's governing council.

The signatories of the letter represent people from the mainstream film industry, regional cinema and the documentary filmmaking community and include such names as Girish Kasarvalli, Resul Pookutty, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Ratnam, Santosh Sivan, Revathi, Aparna Sen, Dibakar Bannerjee, Jahnu Barua, Arun Khopkar, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Kundan Shah and Anand Patwardhan among others.

Mr. Kasaravalli and Mr. Pookutty headed the 10-member delegation in July which held failed parleys with the Information and Broadcasting (I & B) Ministry to hammer out a solution to the crisis.

Mr. Gopalakrishnan, a former FTII chairman, has been vocal in his validation of the students' demands to put into place a transparent process to appoint members to the FTII society. The letter also states in unambiguous terms that the society, in its present form and membership, must be dissolved.

Meanwhile, FTII contract faculty member Abhijit Das, who was on a hunger strike since Friday last week, called of his protest following importunations from the students and the faculty after his sugar dropped to alarmingly low levels.