Film Bazaar, the market event that is organised alongside the International Film Festival of India, attracts people from all departments of cinema. The laboratory and networking event, organised by the National Film Development Corporation, brings together directors, writers, producers and distributors of fiction films and documentaries, sales agents, buyers and programmers. This year’s well-attended event saw projects in different stages of completion get a vital boost in terms of cash prizes that will help them go some way towards completion, a theatrical release and a possible slot at a film festival. Meanwhile, the IFFI continues to showcase Indian films in competitive and non-competitive sections.
Both Film Bazaar and IFFI pose the same question in different ways: what makes a festival film, and what do foreign programmers and buyers make of the bewildering diversity of Indian cinema? Can Indian movies be categorised under a single label, the way Asian Extreme corresponds to ultraviolent gangster, marital arts, and horror films? We posed these questions to two programmers, one from Italy, and the other from India.
Paolo Bertolini, Venice International Film Festival
I have been interested in Indian films for many years. I studied in America at UC Berkeley, where I took classes on Indian films. We ended up watching the really long classics.
Is there a uniquely Indian storytelling idiom? It is a question of getting closer and closer, and the more you watch, the more you understand the aesthetics and the conventions. When I was initially watching Bollywood films that were shown on Italian television, I responded very negatively. I realised that you need to enter a certain code, you have to understand the melodrama, how music plays a role and conveys elements such as love and passion that cannot be disclosed in the rest of the narrative. At some point, you get used to it and start enjoying it.
No Indian director has yet established himself as a bona fide name in the arthouse market. The Western market has a blurred notion of what Indian cinema is. You watch a film like [Malayalam movie] Unto the Dusk and then a Bollywood film. There have been prejudices on both sides: there is a perception that Bollywood is mindless and brainless entertainment and for lowbrow audiences, and there is also a perception that Indian arthouse cinema is outdated. The models are Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, and the country hasn’t come up with anything original since the seventies. Films like Court and Labour of Love [both screened at this year’s Venice Film Festival] are finally breaking this prejudice, and I am glad this is happening.
I find it paradoxical that Venice rescued Court. It had been overlooked by other festivals, and it wasn’t having too much success with sales agents because the movie doesn’t yet have an ‘Indian’ labelling. Trying to establish an Indian label is difficult. If Court, were, say, a Swedish film, it would have been sold everywhere as such. You have an idea that you can sell arthouse films from these countries, but it’s been a while since something like this came out of India.
Let’s face it – some Indian films were not responding to what was in fashion. There was a long hiatus where no Indian film made it. [Ritesh Batra’s] The Lunchbox broke the long dry in a way that is difficult to repeat. Distributors are now looking for the new Lunchbox but even if they find something, it’s not going to be the same.
If I could come up with my personal label for Indian cinema, it would say "diversity". I like the brewing talent in India, which goes back to the tradition that you have so many different kinds of stories and so many carried cultures. When you start digging under the surface, there are cinemas here that are comparable to the ones that come out of an entire continent.
Deepti D’Cunha, Rome International Film Festival & Chicago South Asian Festival
People abroad see Bollywood as a genre – any film from India, even arthouse, is Bollywood. When I took Haider to Rome [for this year’s edition], people were very curious before the screening about how there could be song and dance sequences in a serious film. They asked me, is India still making love stories and do actors still sing to each other? I explain the presence of songs by pointing out that India doesn’t have a separate music industry and that a lot of our popular music comes from the movies.
I don’t have a label for Indian cinema – I simply call it "Indian cinema". I do point out that Bollywood refers only to films made in Bombay, and there are many other language cinemas in India. The analogy I use is that India is like Europe, with many different languages and cultures.
One problem is at the policy level – we don’t release foreign films here, so why should other countries take our films? That’s why some of our movies reflect our own concerns. People who watch these films at festivals often say that there seems to be some often confusion and and a lack of clarity in thought.
Another problem is that in India, distributors won’t pick up [arthouse] films unless they have gone to festivals. Thus Indian filmmakers wants a festival entry so that they can start a conversation with distributors, since there is a real chance that their films might never release in India.
Indian filmmakers are clueless in general – they know only about the Cannes Film Festival. They don’t understand, for instance, that Cannes has official and unofficial selections, and that there is also a festival market. Some filmmakers, usually those making their second or third films, do understand that there are other festivals that are positioned differently.
Indians are scared to come to film markets and network. There are so many directors with completed films, but they would rather spend a crore on marketing in Bombay than two lakhs on travelling to Cannes and getting an industry screening. They need to be more courageous and talk to people from different cultures. Film schools don’t teach this, so who is going to bridge this gap is the question.
The changes in India are very slow. The first film is still a project of passion made with money donated by relatives. I watch between 80 and 90 films in a year, and 40 to 50 of them don’t get completed because of bad budgeting. We also have a huge dearth of creative producers. We have incredible talent among young people and we are very good at line producing, but very bad at creative producing. Some people who want to become directors might actually make really good producers, since they understand the money and the marketing better than the craft. There are directors who have to focus on their craft. If this gap is filled, we will have incredible films and talent emerging.
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Both Film Bazaar and IFFI pose the same question in different ways: what makes a festival film, and what do foreign programmers and buyers make of the bewildering diversity of Indian cinema? Can Indian movies be categorised under a single label, the way Asian Extreme corresponds to ultraviolent gangster, marital arts, and horror films? We posed these questions to two programmers, one from Italy, and the other from India.
Paolo Bertolini, Venice International Film Festival
I have been interested in Indian films for many years. I studied in America at UC Berkeley, where I took classes on Indian films. We ended up watching the really long classics.
Is there a uniquely Indian storytelling idiom? It is a question of getting closer and closer, and the more you watch, the more you understand the aesthetics and the conventions. When I was initially watching Bollywood films that were shown on Italian television, I responded very negatively. I realised that you need to enter a certain code, you have to understand the melodrama, how music plays a role and conveys elements such as love and passion that cannot be disclosed in the rest of the narrative. At some point, you get used to it and start enjoying it.
No Indian director has yet established himself as a bona fide name in the arthouse market. The Western market has a blurred notion of what Indian cinema is. You watch a film like [Malayalam movie] Unto the Dusk and then a Bollywood film. There have been prejudices on both sides: there is a perception that Bollywood is mindless and brainless entertainment and for lowbrow audiences, and there is also a perception that Indian arthouse cinema is outdated. The models are Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, and the country hasn’t come up with anything original since the seventies. Films like Court and Labour of Love [both screened at this year’s Venice Film Festival] are finally breaking this prejudice, and I am glad this is happening.
I find it paradoxical that Venice rescued Court. It had been overlooked by other festivals, and it wasn’t having too much success with sales agents because the movie doesn’t yet have an ‘Indian’ labelling. Trying to establish an Indian label is difficult. If Court, were, say, a Swedish film, it would have been sold everywhere as such. You have an idea that you can sell arthouse films from these countries, but it’s been a while since something like this came out of India.
Let’s face it – some Indian films were not responding to what was in fashion. There was a long hiatus where no Indian film made it. [Ritesh Batra’s] The Lunchbox broke the long dry in a way that is difficult to repeat. Distributors are now looking for the new Lunchbox but even if they find something, it’s not going to be the same.
If I could come up with my personal label for Indian cinema, it would say "diversity". I like the brewing talent in India, which goes back to the tradition that you have so many different kinds of stories and so many carried cultures. When you start digging under the surface, there are cinemas here that are comparable to the ones that come out of an entire continent.
Deepti D’Cunha, Rome International Film Festival & Chicago South Asian Festival
People abroad see Bollywood as a genre – any film from India, even arthouse, is Bollywood. When I took Haider to Rome [for this year’s edition], people were very curious before the screening about how there could be song and dance sequences in a serious film. They asked me, is India still making love stories and do actors still sing to each other? I explain the presence of songs by pointing out that India doesn’t have a separate music industry and that a lot of our popular music comes from the movies.
I don’t have a label for Indian cinema – I simply call it "Indian cinema". I do point out that Bollywood refers only to films made in Bombay, and there are many other language cinemas in India. The analogy I use is that India is like Europe, with many different languages and cultures.
One problem is at the policy level – we don’t release foreign films here, so why should other countries take our films? That’s why some of our movies reflect our own concerns. People who watch these films at festivals often say that there seems to be some often confusion and and a lack of clarity in thought.
Another problem is that in India, distributors won’t pick up [arthouse] films unless they have gone to festivals. Thus Indian filmmakers wants a festival entry so that they can start a conversation with distributors, since there is a real chance that their films might never release in India.
Indian filmmakers are clueless in general – they know only about the Cannes Film Festival. They don’t understand, for instance, that Cannes has official and unofficial selections, and that there is also a festival market. Some filmmakers, usually those making their second or third films, do understand that there are other festivals that are positioned differently.
Indians are scared to come to film markets and network. There are so many directors with completed films, but they would rather spend a crore on marketing in Bombay than two lakhs on travelling to Cannes and getting an industry screening. They need to be more courageous and talk to people from different cultures. Film schools don’t teach this, so who is going to bridge this gap is the question.
The changes in India are very slow. The first film is still a project of passion made with money donated by relatives. I watch between 80 and 90 films in a year, and 40 to 50 of them don’t get completed because of bad budgeting. We also have a huge dearth of creative producers. We have incredible talent among young people and we are very good at line producing, but very bad at creative producing. Some people who want to become directors might actually make really good producers, since they understand the money and the marketing better than the craft. There are directors who have to focus on their craft. If this gap is filled, we will have incredible films and talent emerging.