Bhuvan Lall: Enter the documentary

Documentaries are now the rage in Hollywood

The special screening of Michael Moore's Cannes' Palme d'Or award winning feature documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" on June 9 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences auditorium in Los Angeles attracted the Who's Who of Hollywood.

Almost everyone in Hollywood turned up for this huge event. Among them were Meg Ryan, Jodie Foster, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone and Drew Barrymore and a mix of film makers and studio executives.

The distributor and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, co owner of Miramax, introduced the film. It was also the first showing of the final locked print, with a new sound mix and approximately 10 minutes of footage that was edited after the Cannes Film Festival screenings.

After the screening, Moore got a 70-second standing ovation that began during the closing credits. The film was released across North America on June 25 and is the widest distributed documentary ever.

Documentary films, strictly speaking, are non-fictional, "slice of life," works of art "� they're sometimes known as cinema verite. The first documentary "Nanook of the North" was made in 1922 by Robert Flaherty, often regarded as the "father of the documentary."

For years documentaries didn't seem to be films that would be popular, that would play to packed theatres and that would make money. But the super success of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" changed that perspective and opened doors for the genre like never before.

Today all of a sudden, documentary film makers are raking it in at the box office and documentaries have become more accessible to the public, because they're now structured almost like narrative features. Most importantly, documentaries are made on shoe-string budgets that rarely exceed $1 million.

Smart documentaries like Sony Pictures Classics' "Winged Migration," a film about birds, have topped $10 million at the box office in north America.

Among the other big non-fiction box office hits are ThinkFilm's "Spellbound" (grossed about $6 million), MGM's "That's Entertainment" ($26.9 million) and Artisan's surfer picture "Step Into Liquid" ($3.5 million)."Super Size Me," a film illustrating how a diet of fast food can be bad for your health, has quietly pulled in $6.2 million since its release on May 7.

But Michael Moore's last film "Bowling for Columbine" which grossed more than $21 million in the United States and an additional $10 million internationally, is the most popular non fiction film in history. Moore's "Fahrenheit 911" is expected to gross $ 50 million in the US alone.

Says Sandra Ruch, executive director of the Los Angeles-based International Documentary Association: "India has such a wonderful tradition of documentary film making. I wonder why your films have yet to be seen outside the country in large numbers."

Far away from Sunset Boulevard and the tinsel town of Los Angeles, Hollywood-trained award winning wildlife film maker Mike Pandey is busy explaining to fellow film makers at his studio in New Delhi the urgent need for international distribution and funding. The only Asian to have won the famed Green Oscar twice, Pandey says, "If India has to be part of the documentary movement worldwide our films have to shown globally and funded by international networks."

Indian documentary film makers are world-renowned and have received numerous awards, both for their creativity as well as their ability to unearth the truth.

Besides Pandey, several Indian film makers including Rajiv Mehrotra, Anant Patwardhan, Rakesh Sharma, Anwar Jamal, Amar Kanwar, Rahul Roy, Nikhil Alva and the Bedi brothers have already carved a niche for themselves on the international documentary stage.

The Indian documentary community, which has presented cinematic gems and put Indian images on television screens across the planet, is now looking at expanding its horizons.

Pandey has already been invited to be a jury member of the Wildscreen Film Festival in the UK and his last documentary on whale sharks was instrumental in getting the whale shark global protection.

Anant Patwardhan was the keynote speaker at the Silverdocs film festival in the US in June and Rakesh Sharma picked up the Wolfgang Staudte award at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.

When I met the iconoclastic, sardonic, independent film-maker and journalist Michael Moore at the Majestic Hotel at Cannes a few years ago, we discussed the documentary business, apart from his films. To my question if documentaries would ever become part of the global entertainment economy, Moore replied: "it is bound to happen sooner than later "� docs are more entertaining than fiction!"

That seems to be happening now. Yet the million-dollar question is: will Indian documentary film makers take advantage of this international opportunity?

(Bhuvan Lall is the president and CEO of LALL Entertainment, based in Los Angeles and New Delhi. He can be contacted at lallentertainment@hotmail.com)