How Mehelli Modi is recreating the 16-mm romance with his home video label

It is urgent to prolong the lives of these rare works and make them available to view at home

Mehelli Modi’s memories of his formative years in Bombay play out in the manner of vignettes. The steady thrumming and distinctive scent of a 16mm film projector come to his mind, as do the images of Laurel and Hardy it would cast on the wall of the dining room so that he would eat his food without protest. Some years later, he would spend long hours at screenings of cinema clubs in the city. There used to be one within the “Ramnord” film lab, he remembers, and wasn’t another one housed under the bridge between Marine Lines and Chowpatty? 

Film societies thrived in Bombay in the 1960s. Further, as India remained non-aligned in the throes of the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union had a presence here, and released films from their respective regions, sometimes running to empty rooms. Modi watched scores of Czech and Hungarian films in this period, including Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night (1964), the opening 20 minutes of which had a visceral impact that endured long after he had moved to London by the end of that decade. More recently, in the early 2000s, he went in search of those titles but found “there was no way to see them”. It was urgent, Modi realised, to prolong the lives of these rare works and make them available for home viewing.

The idea for his label, Second Run DVD, was born then. Over the next 15 years, he built a label guided by personal taste, which has come to be quite cherished in world cinema circles. He distributes classic and new films by experimental directors, most often from Central and Eastern Europe. “These are films that we love and hope, in time, they will be recognised by more people.” Titles from Second Run’s selection now appear repeatedly among the best Blu-rays releases nominated annually by critics and curators for the British Film Institute (BFI). A reviewer for Screen Anarchy noted the label was “immediately identifiable by their uniform packaging”.

Modi’s team comprises just “two and a half” members, as sales operations are outsourced, while he and colleague Chris Barwick pick the films, packaging and artwork. He points with some pride to the spine of the DVD cover which bears simply the title and year and, unlike more commercial labels, is uncluttered by laurel wreaths. Rather than list the multiple attainments of a director, the back of the cover too chooses to focus on the merits of a single film. Inside is a booklet containing an essay on the title in question, and movie stills to go with it. Each feature is accompanied by a special segment, usually in the form of an interview with the filmmaker. 

The challenge in the beginning was to gain the trust of directors, especially as Modi wanted to collect at least 20 films before actually launching the label. “It was me saying to them: I want to do this but I don’t have much money, will you give me your film for the next 10 years?” But they were surprisingly forthcoming. Among them, Nicolas Philibert who shared his 2002 film To Be and To Have and two films thereafter, and Ron Peck and Paul Hallam, who came on board with their Nighthawks (1978) about the gay scene in London. Another breakthrough came with releasing Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Blissfully Yours in 2006 just as his fame had been rising; other filmmakers quickly became easier to approach.

These creative preoccupations of Modi are partly an inheritance. He was born to Sohrab Modi — the actor-director-producer best remembered for historicals such as Pukar (1939) and Sikandar (1941) — and Mehtab, the child actress-turned-popular star of films including Chitralekha (1941) and Shama (1946). That last movie had also been played during his mealtime screenings, Modi recollects. He grew up in Cuffe Parade at a time when homes there had unrestricted views of the Arabian Sea, he recounted recently, looking out the window of a cafe in Charing Cross Road’s Foyles bookshop, where our view was of the backs of buildings.

His father had started acting in Parsi theatre, and travelled to army cantonments as a film exhibitor. Eventually, he set up his own film company, Minerva Movietone. Mehelli Modi recalls being in the editing and music rooms of his father’s studio in Sewri as a child. Years after, he had gifted his father a tape recorder to narrate life stories into but it remained unused. “People of that generation rarely talked about themselves.” He hopes ultimately to be able to restore some of his parents’ films, nearly 60 per cent of which no longer survive including Ulti Ganga, a social film with a feminist aura made in 1942.

Despite his artistic legacy, Modi had been encouraged to study the comparatively staid subject of chartered accountancy. London, with its abundance of cinemas and clubs, was the “place to be” in the late 1960s, and he stayed back after his education there. Modi entered the music world in the UK, handling the business for indie record labels such as Nude, which famously produced the albums of the British alt rock band Suede in the 1990s. Record companies at the time appeared to lack the patience to allow the creative development of artists — an endeavour that takes up to five or six albums — so he left that career to concentrate on his “first love” of cinema. Until then, he had indulged that love by collecting movies or recording from television in VHS format; Modi is still holding on to some of these tapes until he can find DVD substitutes.

Second Run now releases a title a month. Malayalam master Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and documentarians Anand Patwardhan and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur are among the Indians featured in the catalogue, and Modi, a regular at the annual festival of the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image, plans to add more works by Indian filmmakers like Mani Kaul and Gurvinder Singh.

Rather than the instantly recognisable masters, the label nurtures relatively under-loved names of arthouse cinema. Take for example František Vlácil — considered the least-known among major figures of Czech national cinema — whose three-hour 13th-century epic Marketa Lazarová (1967) was first brought to DVD by Second Run. Among the younger directors he has worked with is Yorgos Lanthimos; he produced the Greek director’s depressive and overlooked debut Kinetta (2005), just before his international currency soared in 2015 on the success of The Lobster. Modi also released Vera Chytilová’s delightfully nihilistic Sedmikrásky (Daisies), which is routinely screened to full houses at various London venues. 

The DVD industry has struggled in recent years as piracy and online streaming eat into sales and rentals, and cause stores to close. For Modi, it is a tightrope-walk to expand the label while also maintaining its ethos. To fortify itself, Second Run has tied up with BFI’s video-on-demand service, and provides films to MUBI, which lets users stream world cinema titles for a period of one month each. Attention comes by way of film festivals too, many of which now host classic retrospectives. 

The label’s core trade, says Modi, remains relatively shielded as the films are usually too rarefied to be available online or elsewhere, and the enthusiasm of customers — who are interested in both watching and collecting — is unfazed by the streaming revolution. “We still get a lot of ‘thank you’ e-mails from buyers.” Their gratitude is matched by Modi’s, who feels “lucky to be able to do what I love”.