Last year, Dibakar Banerjee walked the red carpet at Cannes Film Festival with Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar for “Bombay Talkies”. This year his protégé Kanu Behl’s film will take the centre stage and Dibakar is in no mood take away any iota of limelight from him. “Yashraj and Guneet Monga have already done the marketing and distribution bit. I am not sure whether I need to go,” says the co-producer. Steering clear of brackets like Bollywood and an Independent film backed by a studio, Dibakar says “Titli” should be seen as an Indian film.
Excerpts:
On association with Kanu Behl
It was quite a coincidence. While I was prepping for “Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye”, Kanu was supposed to deliver some documentaries that were made by Shyamal Karmakar, one of the editors of “OLLO” that I wanted to see. This was the seminal SRFTI batch that under Shyamal’s inspiration was exploring new formats of documentary styles, editing and film language that I was eagerly exploring as a tool to tell the story of Lucky. What I did not know was that Kanu had liked “Khosla Ka Ghosla” a lot and had wanted to meet me anyways. Kanu had slipped in one of his own documentaries which I saw and liked immensely. He came on board as an assistant director on “OLLO”.
On being an official entry at Cannes
It means a gateway to the distributors and producers of a certain kind of world cinema who can take the film to an international audience that is eager to see new voices and new content that break the norm. The whole festival is geared to the business of films like these and it is the best place to be if you want to do commerce with art. It’s a reputation builder for a director. Many renowned international directors - including Tarantino - have broken through at Cannes.
