Directors, first-timers and veterans, are picking scripts that guarantee critical acclaim over commercial success.
Nila Madhab Panda’s film I am Kalam won 11 international awards and one national award, and travelled to 35 different international film festivals. And yet, when it released in Indian theatres earlier this month, the film managed to attract just about 5 per cent occupancy in its opening weekend, and theatre owners were quick to replace the weekday shows with popular commercial films. But Panda does not bemoan his box office collections, saying he was thankful for the good reviews. “My film is good and did not need commercial validation. The awards it has earned and the critical acclaim the script and actors got from the global audience is my reward,” he says.
Panda and a string of directors like Anurag Kashyap, Onir and Dibakar Banerjee, among many other first-time directors, are opting for scripts that would be gladly accepted at film festival screenings and attract critical acclaim, though they may not necessarily be runaway hits at the Indian box office.
The new hunting grounds are film festivals like the London Indian Film Festival (LIFF) which recently screened a host of independent films including Rang Rasiya by Ketan Mehta, Riding The Stallion Of a Dream by Girish Kasaravalli, The White Elephant by Aijaz Khan, That Girl in Yellow Boots by Kashyap, Memories in March by Sanjoy Nag, Just Another Love Story by Kaushik Ganguly and Ladli Laila (Virgin Goat) by Murali Nair. LIFF’s director, Cary Rajinder Sawhney, says: “In addition to showing some great Indian movies, we also aim to help get these films talked about and screened more broadly in cinemas in the UK, in the same way that Iranian cinema has been here.”
A film festival can fetch more than critical acclaim. “Filmmakers whose movies get accepted into a festival,” says Onir “also get valuable press attention and exposure to prospective agents and buyers, not to mention sometimes sizeable cash award if they win. “Onir’s film, I Am, has been officially selected for the Durban International Film Festival, and will also be showcased in Amsterdam at the World Cinema Festival. Sanjay Suri, who has acted in I Am, proudly tweeted about the latest achievement on Twitter, while Onir has been busy collecting awards. The film won Best Film in France Film Festival, Audience Award at the 2010 Florence Indian Film Festival, Best Asian Film Award at the International Film Festival of Kerala and the I-VIEW Film Festival's Engendered Award for Human Rights.
Mehta’s Rang Rasiya will be the opening film of the Chicago South Asian Film Festival that begins on September 30, while Panda’s I Am Kalam will be screened as the centerpiece of the festival. “The need to show the film at the festivals is to find buyers the world over, especially in the non-diaspora market. Today, That Girl In Yellow Boots is getting a 30-print art-house release in the US among the non-diaspora theatres, which is a big thing,” claims Kashyap.
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For first-time directors like Panda, the much-needed film funding and support came from the National Film Development Corporation’s (NFDC) Film Baazar, launched three years ago. It has co-produced films like I Am Kalam, The Girl In Yellow Boots, I Am, and Banerjee’s LSD and Shanghai. Film Bazaar’s co-production market has now expanded to become a market for South Asian stories and has around 20 projects lined up in 2011, says NFDC Managing Director Nina Lath Gupta. “This initiative undertaken by NFDC offers filmmakers the opportunity to present their feature film projects (in all languages and at any stage of production) to co-producers, bankers, funds, sales agents, distributors, TV stations and other potential financiers from India and abroad,” she says.
Thus, projects at all stages are presented at Film Bazaar — at the writing stage in the Screenwriters Lab where six scripts are mentored by international mentors, at the Work-In-Progress Lab which mentors up to six films at the rough cut stage each year and at the co-production market where meetings are set up for project participants with producers looking for Indian films, and with world sales companies and commissioning agents.
Even commercially successful filmmakers like Kashyap see reason in being associated with Film Bazaar. “After Dev D and Gulaal, all the film industry wanted me to do was repeat the same drama. Film Bazaar let me stretch my boundaries beyond Bollywood.” Kashyap maintains that it was through Film Bazaar’s platform that That Girl In Yellow Boots was directly exposed to international markets. “A private producer just wants to make a hit film, while the producers we meet through Film Bazaar’s platform want to make a good film. The biggest difference is the ‘morality’ of the producer,” he says. “Independent cinema is definitely getting a nod in India. But it would be tough to sustain it, unless the government plays a major role in sustaining it, like the world over. Independent films can be made, but where should we take them to exhibit?” says Onir.
NFDC acknowledges that independent films like I am Kalam get inadequate screening in film theatres and steep ticket prices in multiplexes keep audiences away. Gupta says: “It is a fact that distribution and exhibition of such films have always been a challenge. This is a critical challenge that NFDC faces and it hopes to redress the same by aiming at the setting up of specialty theaters.” She adds that NFDC is also setting up a video-on-demand service that would be operational by the end of this financial year.
