Mumbai. Berlin. New York and, now, Transilvania.
Not the kind of places you can tour with Rs. 40,000. Srinivas Sunderrajan's indie feature, ‘The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project', recently chosen as India's official competition entry at the Transilvania International Film Festival held in Cluj, Romania, its latest stop in the festival circuit, even bagged a quick deal with Mubi.com for a limited release online during the festival.
“It was just a screening fee given to all the films that made it to the official competition,” the 26-year-old Mumbai-based filmmaker, whose designation on his visiting card reads ‘Space Invader,' plays it down. But, know what? Srinivas had recovered over 25 per cent of the film's budget with just a few shows online!
Now that he's satisfied with the exposure his meta-film-about-a-film-within-a-film has got around the world (the film played at Berlin's Asian Hotshots, MAMI's Mumbai Film Festival and the South Asian International Film Festival in New York last year), Srinivas hopes to crack the last mile — distribution — all by himself. He's just the role model young independent filmmakers need.
“I am thinking of doing the DVD distribution myself. An independent film needs to be distributed independently. And once the DVD is out, someone will create a torrent and the film will be made available around the world. You won't make money off the torrents but the film will be seen around the world and those who really like the film will buy the DVD,” explains Srinivas who is currently in the process of lining up the DVD special features.
It's refreshing to meet a filmmaker who has absolutely no plans for Bollywood. “As of now, I don't see any point in making bigger films. There is a void in making small films. It's a matter of whether you want to make one big film in a year or three smaller films. But I wouldn't want to go into the surreal metafilm zone again, I'm done with films about making films,” he laughs.
The Tarantino connection
The story behind the film begins when Srinivas met Quentin Tarantino… Yes, you read that right. For real in Los Angeles when he had gone there for the premiere of his short film ‘Tea Break' (It went on to win the Grand Jury Prize for the Best Short at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles in 2007). And Srinivas blogged about his encounter on the now shutdown movie blog passionforcinema.com when one of its contributors, Kartik Krishnan, got in touch with him to make a film.
And it became a metafilm (films that are about themselves/where the production becomes part of the narrative) purely by accident.
“We started around January 2009 and finished early 2010. It was never supposed to take me a year. I had planned 15 days of shoot during weekends but we had lots of issues with locations and dates that it got to a point during the edit when we realised that the only way to put together something cohesive after losing actors and locations was to re-shoot some portions and make it a metafilm,” explains Srinivas.
“First, the film was about Kartik Krishnan wanting to make a film and his process of filmmaking mirrors the film he is planning to write. And then slowly, the film starts taking over his life. But the final film began to mirror my life in making this film rather than Kartik Krishnan's efforts to make his.”
Most of Srinivas's $1000 budget went towards camera rental (a compact HDV camera with two lapel microphones to record sound), food and bribes for locations. And then, there were additional expenses of making beta-tapes to send to festivals, courier charges, etc. “It's not like I decided to make a film within a certain budget. I just wanted to make my film. No other logic. Like the tagline of my film goes, life is larger than logic.”
To order a DVD of ‘The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project,' keep an eye on his website www.enterguerrilla.com
