The lounge of The Moon and Sixpence at Hotel Hablis, Guindy, was unusually crowded for a weekday evening. When the seating wasn’t enough, people had no qualms about sitting on the floor to wait for what seemed like a full-house show.
Sandeep Mohan, an independent filmmaker, is only too happy to see the crowd his movie, Hola Venky, has managed to gather. “I wouldn’t have this many people coming to the theatres to watch this film,” he says.
Sandeep is experimenting with a new kind of movie-watching experience, which he calls ‘The Great Indian Travelling Cinema’. He moves from city to city, with a projector and plays the movie to a gathering willing to watch his work in a space they are comfortable with. All he needs is a white wall. “The urban working class is my audience. Small movies like these don’t get primetime slots in theatres and my target audience wouldn’t come for a 3 p.m. show. Instead, I bring my movie to their doorstep whenever they are free to watch,” says Sandeep, a Mumbai-based filmmaker.
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He has learnt from the struggles during the release of his first film
He has 72 screenings across the world inside corporate buildings, colleges, libraries, in a friend’s living room, pubs and cafes. “I love films and I love travelling. Travelling Cinema gives me an opportunity to pursue both,” says Sandeep. This was his second screening in Chennai, which was organised by IndiEarth.
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“The movie is about the confusions of a middle-aged Indian man who doesn’t know how to react to the independent woman of today,” explains Sandeep who shot the film in India and the U.S., with a three-member crew within a budget of Rs. 10 lakhs.
He says he is absolutely comfortable with making movies with a tight budget as he has a plan in place. “I had shot my first movie in the U.S. and I was familiar with a lot of places. I wrote the script keeping those places in mind. It helped me save money and time. In fact, except for the lead actors — Roger Narayan and Sonia Balcazar, the others are regular people. ”
Sandeep, along with his sound recordist Avantika Nimbalker and cameraman Prashant Sehgal, took to the streets of Mumbai and San Francisco to shoot the film ‘guerrilla-style’ in 24 days. Shreyas Beltangdy did the post-production work.
Though these screenings are free, Sandeep has found a way to make money out of it. “My friend Giju John, the producer of the film, took care of half the budget; the rest of the production cost was crowd-sourced. I still needed to make money to bear the travelling expenses. For the first few screenings, I placed a bag in front of the audience and asked them to put an amount they thought the movie deserved. Now, I give them envelopes with a feedback form and ask them to keep the money in it with the filled form,” says Sandeep, all set to take Hola Venky to eight cities in the U.S.
Sandeep Mohan is also a part of X-The Film .