Regional or low budget Indian films might be receiving accolades in international film festivals around the world, but are finding it difficult to reach out to the audiences back home.
“Absence of coherent industry regulation, lack of governmental support to showcase low budget or documentary films and the acute fund crunch that is adversely affecting the independent filmmaking,” said Aniruddha Chowdhury, director of Bengali movie 'Antaheen' at a panel discussion on the backdrop of Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival.
At a time when the film fraternity is celebrating 100 years of Indian Cinema, film making is still not recognised as a form of art and culture. Film making, on Wednesday, is often directed by the market.While Bollywood is splurging crores on popular commercial movies, independent film makers in regional industries are finding it difficult to source money and are often cash trapped.
“Even national award winning off-beat movies are not slotted on the prime time in Doordarshan and are pushed to graveyard slots or the late night slot,” said Onir, director, ‘My brother Nikhil’, a movie on the issue of AIDS. Speaking on the apathy of multiplexes to showcases documentary films, Onir said that multiplexes tend to push documentary movies in the morning slows so the private television channels must come up to support these films.” In addition to this, the government must support these movies by showcasing them on governmental theatres.
While Suman Mukhopadhyay, director, ‘Mahanagar @Kolkata’, highlighted that absence of uniform industry regulations often tamper with the process of film making. “According to the guild in Tollygunge film industry, the film maker has to engage minimum 50 local technicians even if your film budget doesn't permit so the director has to expand the budget of the film,” said Mukhopadhyay.
Notably, Onir has created a forum 'Save Indian Cinema' along with hosts of low budget film makers. “We have send a petition to the Ministry of Information and Broadcast,” said Onir. “However, the government has assured to open stand alone theatres will showcase documentary films in two months.” he added. The panelist also appealed to the corporates to come forward in helping theses independent film makers with monetary and spatial support.
