On the second day of MAMI, producer Guneet Monga (The Lunchbox, Gangs of Wasseypur, Shaitan) screened a two-minute trailer of her film Monsoon Shootout to distributors. Afterwards, she recalled the Orson Welles quote about a filmmaker’s life being 2 per cent about moviemaking and 98 per cent hustling. “We’re starting the journey of hustling from here,” she said. Everyone laughed.
Baradwaj Rangan Monsoon Shootout was part of 24 films (18 features and six feature-length documentaries) selected for the Mumbai Film Market (MFM), an initiative by Kiran Rao (Chairperson of MAMI), Anupama Chopra (Festival Director), and Smriti Kiran (Creative Director, Programming, Production and Operations). “For a while now, I’ve been wondering how to make films that are not market-driven,” Rao told me. “Building a bridge between risky/independent/small films and the audiences for them – this concerns me as a filmmaker. When I came on board MAMI last year, I thought it was an opportunity to start looking at this.”
Both Rao and Chopra have deep-rooted connections in the industry – the big players, the distributors and studios, and sales agents. They called on them. “It’s a small, one-day market,” Rao said. Chopra joked that this was their version of an arranged marriage. “The boys and girls are going to check each other out.” To officiate the proceedings, Rao and Chopra called on Saameer Mody, Managing Director of Pocket Films. With good reason. He helped them round up the grooms and produce the market.
«««
Pocket Films is India’s largest aggregator and distributor of short films in the digital space. With MFM, Mody is extending his experience – one might even say expertise – to feature films and feature-length documentaries. This is not the first time a film festival has hosted a market, but this is the first time a curated set of films (culled from the Indian submissions to MAMI) is being presented to potential buyers. “The initial pool consisted of around 225 films,” said Bina Paul, Head of the Indian Program at MAMI, whose partner in the two-and-a-half-month curation process was Deepti DCunha (Programmer, Indian Selection). “We were really keen on the whole business of not concentrating on Hindi cinema, putting an emphasis on the fact that India is not just Hindi cinema.”
Hence, the line-up of Tamil, Assamese, Malayalam, Marathi, Haryanvi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu and Kannada films, including Hindi ones. There’s even a Hindi/Nepali/English entry: Chandrashekhar Reddy’s Fireflies in the Abyss. Official synopsis: Even with the odds stacked against him, Suraj, an 11-year-old boy, fights his way out of a life in the ‘rat-hole’ coalmines to put himself in school.
“We have two objectives,” Mody said. One, to highlight good independent films for different distributors. “Sometimes filmmakers lose out because they don’t have the right sources or contacts. We are getting all these distributors in one room.” He spoke of theatrical distributors like Yash Raj, Eros, Fox, and also non-traditional buyers like hotstar.com and Amazon Instant Video, which brings us to point two. “Impress upon filmmakers that theatrical distribution is not the be all and end all.” Smita Jha, Leader - Entertainment and Media Practice India, PricewaterhouseCoopers, told the audience, “Put the mobile at the centre of your business strategy. In less than two years, 50 per cent of the world’s population will be mobile Internet subscribers.” It’s no accident that the logo of Pocket Films is a smartphone peeking out of a denim pocket.
I asked Chopra if filmmakers would find it hard to reconcile to the fact that their films will be seen on a smartphone. “I know it can seem like defeat,” she said. “But filmmakers need to rethink.” She said the Indian business model is now like Hollywood’s, where it’s easier to make a $200 million film than one for $40 million. “For a mid-level film, costing Rs. 4-5 crore, you have to spend Rs. 5-7 crore on publicity. And moviegoing is so expensive today that the average viewer will choose the big mainstream movie at the theatre. You have to seduce them on other platforms. It’s the choice between not finding viewers at all versus finding them while they’re, say, having a meal. If your work is good, they may begin to seek you out, even in theatres.
«««
Vetri Maaran, the acclaimed Tamil filmmaker who is readying the release of Visaaranai, didn’t seem overly concerned about finding audiences through non-theatrical avenues. “I make films for my people but with some international sensibilities. These markets can take my films to non-diaspora audiences.” He’s been to film markets at Cannes and Montreal, hawking his 2011 feature Aadukalam, and he pointed to Kaaka Muttai, which took the film festival route to success in both domestic and international markets. He said he was interested in meeting with Amazon Instant Video, to explore the possibility of a digital release. “I want to see how they can help.”
But this isn’t about finding viewers. At least, not just that. “People who don’t go to theatres are going to see the film on a pirated DVD. This is about making more money for investors.” Maaran sees this as a way to recoup the money he loses by not compromising... When I dropped the word, he gently corrected me. “Filmmaking is about compromise at every stage.” He prefers the term “exploitation of viewers” through ingredients like item songs. He wants to reduce this exploitation. “That’s why we need to be unconventional about how we market films.”
A few days after the market, Mody told me that “a lot of interesting conversations” have been happening, though nothing has been officially closed yet. I asked Chopra if the MFM could be seen as some sort of movement. She said, “It’s too ambitious to think about the market like that. But look, it’s finally a business. It’s dhandha, as crass as that sounds. Even if one film finds a distributor, we would have done our job.”
baradwaj.r@thehindu.co.in
