Back to the future

Two dynamic ladies, who took over the reins of Mumbai’s biggest film festival at a time when everyone was busy writing its obits, on the pleasures and pains of managing it

October 17, 2016 12:21 am | Updated 12:21 am IST

Mumbai 15-10-2016:  Profile Shoot of Anupama Chopra With Kiran Rao at Santacruz.
Photo By: Rajneesh Londhe

Mumbai 15-10-2016: Profile Shoot of Anupama Chopra With Kiran Rao at Santacruz.
Photo By: Rajneesh Londhe

There’s less than a week for the city’s own film festival, the Jio MAMI 18th Mumbai Film Festival with STAR, to unfold. In the buzzing suburban office, amid all the urgency and chaos, we manage to sit down with Jio MAMI’s chairperson Kiran Rao and festival director Anupama Chopra for a quick tête-à-tête. Excerpts:

All set for the big week?

Anupama Chopra: We hope. We are as set as we can be. It’s a live event. There is no way for us to plan for the stuff that happens. So Nick James [editor, Sight and Sound] was going to be the international mentor for our Young Critics Lab.

But the poor man is down with a really bad viral and can’t make it.

Kiran Rao: The last-minute scrambling is part of it.

AC: And we have learnt to be slightly Zen-like about it.

KR: You have to plan and prepare for all eventualities and then just deal with it.

If you look at this year’s festival objectively, what would you say you have been able to achieve? And what is it that you wanted to do but couldn’t?

AC: The new verticals that we have added are exciting. The Word To Screen section is something we wanted to do last year, but didn’t have the money and the bandwidth.

Just the idea of marrying publishers with the filmmakers to enable a greater conversation so that people can pick manuscripts much before they go into print. That’s something I have talked about and thought about for so long. We are really excited about Marathi Talkies. Marathi cinema has always been part of MAMI but we have tried to engage with the industry in a deeper way. Like getting the Ventilator [by Rajesh Mapuskar] premiere.

Kiran has all sorts of amazing things happening with the New Medium, which is really her baby. This is how we balance it out. I am all about the popular Movie Mela and she is all about the indie; the new medium. She even has a band coming in from Ukraine.

KR: This section has been curated by artiste Shaina Anand. It is a historic look at cinema and the innovations in cinema. It has some of the most seminal works and we are trying to take cinema outside the idea of just viewing films in a theatre. So we have Lis Rhodes’s Light Music , which is an installation piece within a cinema. It’s a 1975 piece. We are showing Mani Kaul’s Ahamaq , a TV mini series which hasn’t been seen on screen, the newly restored Man With The Movie Camera [by Dziga Vertov], which will be screened with a live band. [Uday Shankar’s] Kalpana is screening, there is [John Abraham’s] Agraharathil Kazhuthai

It’s a view of innovations in cinema across time. It’s not a stodgy, experimental section. It will reach out to a wider audience.

Anything you wanted but could not get?

AC: [Damien Chazelle’s] La La Land, [Pablo Larrain’s] Jackie . Those are the titles we chased like banshees. But they didn’t make it.

Each festival tries to seek an identity of its own. Is MAMI growing towards getting any such marker?

AC: I think what MAMI has always stood for, even before we stepped in, is really solid programming. There has never been a specific content brief. So it is not genre cinema or Arabic cinema. I don’t think that’s the direction we want to take it in. We want it to be an inclusive festival that has something for everyone and all kinds of movies. My memory of MAMI has been about how kickass the programming was and how passionate people were. So the lines for [Alejandro Gonzalez] Inarritu’s Biutiful ; the mara maari. That’s really what MAMI is for me: mad passion for movies. Last year there were people breaking the door down for [Jacques Audiard’s] Dheepan .

KR: I have been to the festival as an audience, stood in the lines. It was our only chance to watch some titles on the big screen. For cinephiles in India, it is difficult to watch a Dheepan or Biutiful on the big screen. That was the identity, that it would get the best of world festival winners to our city. But it was also the gateway for the world to the Indian cinema, a showcase for Indian cinema that we ourselves don’t get to see. This is a role we can play. That should be one of our focuses. I hope it slowly grows to be our identity and I hope Indian films would like to premiere with us, at least an Asian premiere. Vikram’s [Vikramaditya Motwane] film Trapped is a world premiere this year. So we want to be the festival of choice of Indian filmmakers and be their showcase, give them pride of place.

You seem to have a lot of debut films this year.

AC: There are lots of debut films [not just in the competition] sprinkled throughout.

KR: We can do that well. Most filmmakers who have shown their films at MAMI feel like it was a great place for them. They got a lot out of being at the festival, not just in terms of PR but in terms of networking, just the general word of mouth to audiences. If you look at our Indian section there are filmmakers from all over the country. That’s the most exciting thing. Where do you get a section where you can watch films from different States? That hopefully over the years will emerge as our strongest identity.

Till a few years ago, accessing big, celebrated film titles was impossible other than seeing them in the festivals. With the Internet, you have this very savvy generation that is legally or illegally accessing cinema from the world over. How does a festival respond to this change?

AC: It is a tough one. For many of us, there is no replacement for the big screen. For the community experience of sitting in the hall and watching with 300 other people. Pristine, no interruptions, nothing. But for some kids it’s like, ‘Who cares? I will watch it on my phone’. Yes, that is something all of us in the film festival need to think about and address. But in India, this is the only place where you will see an uncensored, uncut film, without an interval, with no distortion of the original vision. What we offer because of the external situation in the country makes our festival relevant in ways they may not be in other countries.

KR: We also have Q&As with the director. We have the Movie Mela. You have access to watching something with a live band to create experiences you wouldn’t otherwise get on your phone or at home. Festivals across the world create a meeting ground for people to network, to exchange ideas, to meet people from other countries and to also experience other things. A Masterclass with Cary Fukunaga — where would you get that on your phone? You could ask Jia Zhangke a question here. That’s an opportunity you wouldn’t otherwise get. Big screen experience is what all cinephiles love but there are also these add-ons

AC: There is also this spirit in a festival. There is camaraderie: we will watch four films in a row. There is a certain emotion which comes with it. Last year, we had these kids come in from the University of Srinagar. There are no theatres there. This year, we have a delegation coming in from Bhutan. It’s a filmmaking country, but one which can benefit from an experience like this. There are between six to 10 theatres there. Khyentse Norbu’s Hema Hema is showing and nine people are travelling from Bhutan.

KR: It’s nice that people can develop these relationships in the subcontinent.

Anu, you have been a film critic, journalist. And Kiran, you are a filmmaker. And both of you are now curating films. Where does it take you personally? How does it expand your horizons?

KR: Unfortunately, Anu and I don’t get to watch any films. We thought we’ll see them first, hot off the press but nothing. It’s great for me, it’s also a lot of what I already do. I am a producer; I work with teams to make films happen. I have a great team here to make a festival happen.

AC: What would have been an organic fit is curation. But I can’t say that the festival in the last two years has been a reflection of my taste or my curatorial prowess. It’s our programmers who have done it. For us the whole thing was to raise the money. I had never gone to offices with PPTs, had conversations or done pitches on ROI. So for me, it has been a steep learning curve. I don’t produce. I am not involved with Vinod’s [Vidhu Vinod Chopra] films at all. My work as a journalist has been mostly solitary. It has made me have deep respect for people who do this.

KR: The only reason I am doing it is because we have such a great team involved. We are doing this literally, entirely out of passion. We are giving our time and our energy. I am not saying it’s entirely thankless, but there are no great awards that we are winning at the end of this. We are doing it because we have a great time working together.

When does the work start for the next festival?

AC: Literally, the next day. Last year when it ended we were in a meeting with Cameron Bailey [of Toronto film festival] the next day. We wanted to cement the residency at Toronto.

What do people criticise the festival about?

AC: Of course, Bollywood.

Also sponsorship. If there is too much of it...

AC: It’s a very, very expensive exercise. I don’t think people understand that. I didn’t despite going to festivals all my life. Each title costs between 800 to 1,200 euros. So you calculate what it costs to get 175 films. What the theatres cost. What the team this size costs. We are volunteers here but everybody else needs to get paid. I am talking crores, not lakhs. When you are spending that kind of money you need someone to sign that cheque. The government is extremely supportive of us but there is no monetary support technically, they have given us other facilities. So who is paying for this? In 2014 [when the festival was in financial trouble] individuals paid for it, we all paid for it.

KR: Across the city people came forward and the city paid for it.

AC: But that’s not the way you build anything sustainable. If you guys think there are too many sponsors you should be saying thank you to them because this city would not have had the festival if Star and Jio had not come on board. And entertainment doesn’t come under CSR [corporate social responsibility]. This is coming out of their marketing budgets. It would be so much easier for them to put the same money on an award show that would have got them good TRPs. They came in when this was sinking, and in shambles.

KR: In 2015, we didn’t know if we had a festival up until May or something. We had no idea if we could pull it off.

AC: I don’t get the sponsor criticism at all because really then who is paying?

KR: Our registrations are very, very minimal. They just cover the cost of the brochure. It is very little for one week of cinema watching.

What about Bollywood?

AC: I take the blame for it. I love Bollywood. More seriously, I find these definitions of cinema very archaic. Someone asked me the other day if there were any Bollywood films at the festival. What would you call A Death In The Gunj ? It’s produced by Abhishek Chaubey who has worked with Shahid Kapur. Does that make it Bollywood? It is made by Konkona who did a film with Ranbir. Is she Bollywood? These definitions are just old and redundant. As far as talent is concerned we seek them out. I ask for support. The truth is that every festival in the world has great red carpets. I honestly don’t know what the downside of that is. I think as long as our programming is completely sacrosanct why would we not engage with the biggest brand we have? Why would we sit here in Mumbai? We could well be in Kumaon. We have got a huge, amazing, vibrant industry why would we not engage with it? And this festival exists because that time in 2014 so many people reached out. Sonam, Anushka…

KR: Anushka Sharma sent the first cheque. Why do we segregate the Hindi film industry? They are also artistes, people who work. They are also a creative industry. They just happen to be better looking than most people. Lot of them avidly watch world cinema. They try to do the best they can in the films they get. There is a huge number of them who want to support all kinds of cinema.

AC: For me the beauty of last year was that there was an award ceremony where Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot got the top prize and Salman Khan was on stage. That’s what makes it for me.

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