Cinema finds a new financier

CINEMA: Osian's takes the first cautious step into film production.

Neville Tuli has always been something of a maverick. The man who revolutionized the business of Indian art with Osian's Auction House and Archive, which he set up in 2000, and then turned his attention last year to, of all things, football, has a new focus for his attentions "" cinema.

It's not new, strictly speaking of course, since Osian's has been associated with cinema since 2004 when it acquired Cinemaya, the Asian film quarterly, and Cinefan, the Asian (and now Arab) film festival held in Delhi, and then bought Minerva, the heritage theatre in central Mumbai, last year, which is being transformed into Osianama, an integrated complex with film theatres and post-production facilities.

But what's new is that Osian's is making a cautious entry into film production. Initially, the company will allocate a grant ranging between Rs 3-10 lakh for script completion, location finalization, casting, and other pre-production parameters to 20 select filmmakers and projects, mostly debut ventures.

"The lack of experimentation, bold and fearless subject matter as basis of scripts and narratives, and risk taking in the Indian film industry" pains Tuli, who feels it "does not augur well for us in the future".

To start with Rs 1 crore has been kept aside by Osian's for this Film Development Fund along with Rs 25 lakh for administrative support.

"The younger generation of film-makers needs to be given a major encouragement without certain commercial conditions being imposed, expected or demanded," feels Tuli.

That's grand, especially, in a country where public funding for good cinema has been all but sidelined. Think of NFDC and the films it once gave out funds for "" Ray's Ghare Baire, Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaron, K S Sethu Madhavan's Marupakkam, more recently Rajat Kapoor's Raghu Romeo.

According to its 2005-06 annual report, in its core activity of film financing and production in that year, the NFDC completed production of one feature film in Tamil (Sasanam by J Mahendran) while another in Bengali (Sanskar by Nabyendu Chatterjee) was under production. Also the company received just Rs 4.77 crore from the government as working capital in this activity.

It's a good thing the private sector has more than made up for this loss. "First time film-makers says Kunal Kohli, the director of box-office hits Fanaa and Hum Tum, "have never had it so good. In 2007 especially, all the films that have done well have been by first-timers. Take Shootout at Lokhandwala or Cheeni Kum. And this has been a trend in the past few years. Mainstream is not a single formula now, but all kinds of different subjects and sensibilities. Naturally, corporate funding is responsible for much of this."