Single-window clearance for international film and documentary crews shooting in India. Sounds familiar?
Over the years, that’s a promise that various authorities have made. In 2013, the Congress Party-led regime actually set up a department to help foreign crews obtain the various permissions they need from multiple ministries and departments before they can shoot in India. But it hasn’t lived up its expectations, and the process of making films in India is still replete with hassles and harassment. In an attempt to cut the red tape, representatives of several film organisations and firms have held meetings in Mumbai over the past few days, hoping to frame a petition that it can take to the government.
Among those present were members of the Film and Television Producers Guild of India, the apex body that represents Bollywood’s elite, as well as companies and individuals who handle production for visiting crews.
Two issues were discussed: reducing the time taken to procure permits for foreign crews that want to shoot in India and the fees to be paid to locals employed on such projects.
Complex procedures
Although permissions are supposed to take three weeks to obtain, they can often take close to three months or even longer. If the locations include, say, an archaeological site, a forest, a politically sensitive area, and Mumbai, clearances are needed at the very least from the Archaeological Survey of India, the Home Ministry, Ministry of Environment and Forests, and several departments in the metropolis, including the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the Mumbai Police and also its Traffic wing.
Scripts and a list of locations must be submitted and vetted in advance, the number of shooting days needs to be specified, and the appropriate visas need to be applied for (business visas for feature films and journalist visas for documentary filmmakers.) Depending on the complexity of the shoot, different sets of fees need to be paid to different authorities.
Filmmakers must not deviate from the original script or synopsis, and must definitely not attempt to besmirch India’s name. Filmmakers are supposed to share their finished films with government authorities before making them public (though this diktat is rarely followed). Once international crews come to India, they need to pay three times the rate to the locals they hire -- a fee that has been decided upon by local trade unions that represent various professions.
How it works (or doesn’t)
A typical example: Wide Screen Films, a production company in Chennai run by Suresh Balaje and George Pius, recently handled the Tamil Nadu shoot of a portion of reputed French director Jacques Audiard’s upcoming drama Dheepan about Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Paris. (Tamil Nadu stood in as a location for Sri Lanka.) The process, Pius explained, included handing in a copy of the script and an exact list of locations to the Information and Broadcasting ministry and approaching state-level government departments such as the local police. The only hitch with Dheepan was that the Indian Embassy in Paris delayed the visas of the French crew.
“By and large, we have not faced any problems,” Pius said. Wide Screen also handled the Puducherry shoot of Michel Spinosa’s 2014 movie His Wife, starring real-life couple Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg. “Foreign shoots help generate employment for locals,” Pius added. “I personally find that foreign crews are much more organised and their method of working is more detailed. They do their homework very well, and they know exactly what they want. If something is not allowed, they find ways to work around it.”
While feature films are cleared by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, the Ministry of External Affairs’ Publicity Division decides which documentary filmmakers may shoot in India. The process has become somewhat simpler for documentary directors: their proposals can now be cleared by Indian embassies and missions in their respective countries. The ministries promise, but rarely deliver, a response within three weeks.
“It can sometimes take up to two to three months to get permissions”, which can throw a shooting schedule out of whack, said Deborah Benattar, whose company, La Fabrique Films, was one of the organisations that has been talking to the films and television guild about the need for a single-window clearance department. “You have to reveal the exact locations and stick to them, and you can’t change a location because of logistical issues, such as, say, the weather.” If you decide to add a location or two, you need to file for a fresh shooting permit.
Benattar recently helped two French productions, Cow-Boys and Black Diamond, shoot in India, and she also complained about the fact that international film crews need to pay three times the rate to local technicians and labourers. “When Indians go aboard to shoot, they usually get incentives and tax rebates,” she noted. “India keeps promoting itself as a location abroad, and you say you welcome foreign shoots here, but then you should make the process easier. You need one entity to look at all the permissions, and you need a committee that can read scripts in two weeks.”
Tackling the bureaucracy
India has a continent’s worth of charms and a matching set of ministries, departments and sub-departments in charge of handing out shooting permits. The country’s notorious reputation for a slow-moving and corrupt bureaucracy and prickliness about its international image loom over every proposal, big and small.
There is often no consistency to who gets in and who doesn’t. Danny Boyle was allowed to shoot 2009’s Slumdog Millionaire in a country hyper-sensitive to the cinematic portrayal of its poverty. But the producers of the 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall were denied permission to shoot an action sequence on top of a moving train because the Railway Ministry felt India would be shown in a poor light. India’s loss was Turkey’s gain.
The more sensitive the subject, the longer the wait. Indian wildlife in general and tigers in particular, tribal areas, slums, caste politics, locations along any of the national borders, and political hot potatoes (Kashmir or Manipur, for instance) can result in delays or outright denials, say line producers.
One place where it is nearly impossible to shoot is the Alang shipbreaking yard in Gujarat because, as the location scout put it, “the labour practices are just appalling and they wouldn’t want the world to see it”.
Some of the reasons for turning down an application can be valid, such as a reality television shoot in an ecologically fragile zone. Well-regarded line producer Toby Sinclair, who has been in the game since 1980, remembers being approached by the company behind Bear Grylls’s survival shows to do a couple of episodes that involved Grylls being parachuted into a national park and surviving on whatever food was available on the ground.
“I said, no, and I put this down in writing: half of what they wanted to do was illegal,” said Sinclair, who has worked on several documentaries by the British Broadcasting Corporation and renowned naturalist David Attenborough set in India. “You can’t fly over a national park, and you can’t cut down leaves or bushes or whatever else you need to survive in the jungle. I wouldn’t ask for permissions even if the crew was pretending to do it.”
There are occasions when Kafka’s ghost surfaces, such as when permission for a documentary on the relationship between humans and animals in various countries was stalled last year for three months. The crew wanted to shoot cows and the Karni Mata rat temple in Bikaner. The reason it was denied approvals: the application used the phrase “holy cows”. The team eventually lost interest in filming in India.
Tricks of the trade
Local line producers, pejoratively known as “fixers”, come into the picture only after the scripts are cleared. The initial application letter itself, therefore, is vital in securing the ministry’s co-operation, said Shernaz Italia, one of the most seasoned producers in India who has, along with her partner Freny Khodaiji, handled numerous documentary shoots and Mira Nair productions, including Monsoon Wedding and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
“Basically, my expertise lies in two things: how to write a proposal, and patience,” Italia joked. “My general advice is to apply well in time, and to write an application in a way that is simple and straightforward. Ninety per cent of your battle is won in the way you write a proposal. Ask for more days than you actually require, especially if you are shooting at an archaeological site, and especially if it is the monsoon. Ask for more locations that you might actually need.”
Italia has been in the field since 1986, and she remembers a time when it would take months for projects to be cleared. “The time taken to get the general shooting permit has come down,” she observed. “Earlier, you had to have all the permits in place before you got the general permit. Now, you apply to the specific departments after you have the general permission in place.” The Environment Ministry is one place whose go-ahead is needed before embarking on a project.” The fact that Indian foreign missions have the authority to clear projects has also shortened the gap between intent and action, Italia added.
The circumstances in which documentaries and feature films are shot in India are vastly different – a fact that will have to be considered if a single-window clearance system is indeed set into place. “You need some distinction between feature films and documentaries – feature films can potentially disrupt the traffic, for instance, which we don’t do,” pointed out Amit Vachharajani, a veteran line producer in Mumbai. “Outside Bombay, people tend to be more relaxed, but on the streets here, everybody is a vigilante.”
There are rules for everything, but some of them are so general that they expose crews to harassment and corruption. “For instance, the application form for documentaries says that the producer needs to obtain local permits wherever necessary,” a location scout said on the condition of anonymity. “Of course we take the permissions when we are shooting at stations, airports or historical monuments, but what if I want to shoot the Victoria Terminus station in Mumbai from the outside for five minutes?”
It isn’t possible for documentary filmmakers to submit a list of locations to be covered and the shooting dates and timings in advance, given the fluid nature of the form, the scout pointed out.
For every bad experience India has had from crews, such as the French filmmakers who clandestinely made the documentary Organic Jarawa, on the endangered tribe in the Andamans last year, there are several genuine cases that get delayed or stymied because of governmental suspicion about their intentions. “In application forms, I remove any locations that are near national borders,” said a local line producer on the condition of anonymity. “I also avoid potentially tricky assignments altogether. Bad relations with the MEA’s External Publicity division can screw your career.”
Yet, the number of documentary filmmakers coming to India has only increased because of the deep interest in showcasing the country’s richness, the producer added.
“I have always believed in the system, however long it takes,” Italia said. “You can get permission to shoot even at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, for instance, if you follow the procedure. This is the house of the president, after all. If you wanted to shoot at the Buckingham Palace, do you think you would get permission to shoot in two days?”
Single-window clearance might work for feature films, but documentaries still need to be passed by the External Affairs Ministry as well as various state government departments, Toby Sinclair said. “For instance, what happens when you want to make a documentary on the East India Company?” he said. “It’s a controversial history, and you can’t argue with history but only learn from it. Who makes the decision and who handles the clearances?”
Different payment slabs
There is also no clarity on how a single-window clearance system will address the differential payment slabs that come into force for international productions. They must pay three times the going local rate to Indian technicians, and opinions are divided on this practice too. “I totally agree with this practice,” Italia said. “When you have a budget of a few million, what are a few hundred rupees? Why don’t you bring all your technicians here in that case, and pay their airfare and hotel charges? If you can take Indians who do the same work as your crew, why not you pay them international rates?”
Here too, like with permissions, international productions and their local handlers need to deal with different profession-based guilds across states, depending on where the shoot is taking place.
One of the leading unions, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees, used to be a de facto single window clearance body when it came to hiring local talent before other bodies sprang up over the past few years, said FWICE Secretary Dilip Pitwa. “There are several unions affiliated to political parties that have nothing to do with the film industry, and some of them disrupt shoots by asking questions about visas and permissions,” Pitwa said. “As a federation, we support single window clearance.” The FWICE claims a membership of 2.5 lakh members.
On the issue of differential payments, Pitwa is clear that the system is fair and necessary. “It is much cheaper for foreign crews to shoot here, and our members work exclusively for them for as long as the shoot lasts,” he said. Although Indian crews get tax breaks and concessions to shoot in foreign countries, they are spending more in terms of foreign exchange, Pitwa contended.
West is best
Despite the unequal foreign exchange rates, Indian film crews that travel abroad find the process far more attractive than back home. They are wooed with tax breaks and other financial concessions and get their location permissions from a single authority.
Producer Miriam Joseph spent over a decade bringing BBC crews to India and then working in Mumbai with the Bollywood company Excel Entertainment. Her first big foreign shoot was for Farhan Akhtar’s Don in Malaysia in 2006. All permissions were given by a single central agency called Puspal. “You put in your application along with the script, it gets sent to all the departments--religious affairs, police, external affairs, and so on--- and once you get your clearance, you can literally close your eyes and get the shoot done,” Joseph said. “After that, unless you are asking for something ridiculous or outrageous, the permissions mean that all the concerned government departments are supposed to co-operate. For a country that barely has a film industry, they have all the infrastructure in place.”
George Pius has shot various films in parts of the US, where the local films commissions are “very helpful”, and “put you on to good location managers”. He added, “When I wanted a location for a film that wasn’t on their list, they sent somebody over and sorted it out. We had to block off an entire road for an accident scene, and it was done. Of course, we paid a fee for it, but it was all very efficient. There is less paperwork and lot of it is online.”
European countries also have national and regional film commissions, which facilitate location shooting and offer incentives in exchange for providing their locals employment and showcasing tourism, Joseph said. “These countries believe that there is an industry that is worth growing, but in India, because we already have so many industries, the government doesn’t feel the need to extend time and energy on what could be a serious revenue earner,” she said. “We have so much more to offer in terms of places, stories and really skilled manpower. Yet we choose to do very little.”
Individual states such as Goa and Rajasthan are widely regarded as having done more than others to help international productions and earn goodwill and revenue. “Rajasthan has no indigenous movie culture, but hundreds of crews come there, and its tourism department has been doing whatever it can to make things easier,” Joseph said. The problem, as with so much else in India, is about replicating a successful local example on the national level.
“The problem is of reciprocity – you cannot advertise India as a place to shoot and then make permissions difficult and charge three times the rate,” Deborah Benattar said. “This is the reality and nobody tells you that in advance.”
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Over the years, that’s a promise that various authorities have made. In 2013, the Congress Party-led regime actually set up a department to help foreign crews obtain the various permissions they need from multiple ministries and departments before they can shoot in India. But it hasn’t lived up its expectations, and the process of making films in India is still replete with hassles and harassment. In an attempt to cut the red tape, representatives of several film organisations and firms have held meetings in Mumbai over the past few days, hoping to frame a petition that it can take to the government.
Among those present were members of the Film and Television Producers Guild of India, the apex body that represents Bollywood’s elite, as well as companies and individuals who handle production for visiting crews.
Two issues were discussed: reducing the time taken to procure permits for foreign crews that want to shoot in India and the fees to be paid to locals employed on such projects.
Complex procedures
Although permissions are supposed to take three weeks to obtain, they can often take close to three months or even longer. If the locations include, say, an archaeological site, a forest, a politically sensitive area, and Mumbai, clearances are needed at the very least from the Archaeological Survey of India, the Home Ministry, Ministry of Environment and Forests, and several departments in the metropolis, including the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the Mumbai Police and also its Traffic wing.
Scripts and a list of locations must be submitted and vetted in advance, the number of shooting days needs to be specified, and the appropriate visas need to be applied for (business visas for feature films and journalist visas for documentary filmmakers.) Depending on the complexity of the shoot, different sets of fees need to be paid to different authorities.
Filmmakers must not deviate from the original script or synopsis, and must definitely not attempt to besmirch India’s name. Filmmakers are supposed to share their finished films with government authorities before making them public (though this diktat is rarely followed). Once international crews come to India, they need to pay three times the rate to the locals they hire -- a fee that has been decided upon by local trade unions that represent various professions.
How it works (or doesn’t)
A typical example: Wide Screen Films, a production company in Chennai run by Suresh Balaje and George Pius, recently handled the Tamil Nadu shoot of a portion of reputed French director Jacques Audiard’s upcoming drama Dheepan about Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Paris. (Tamil Nadu stood in as a location for Sri Lanka.) The process, Pius explained, included handing in a copy of the script and an exact list of locations to the Information and Broadcasting ministry and approaching state-level government departments such as the local police. The only hitch with Dheepan was that the Indian Embassy in Paris delayed the visas of the French crew.
“By and large, we have not faced any problems,” Pius said. Wide Screen also handled the Puducherry shoot of Michel Spinosa’s 2014 movie His Wife, starring real-life couple Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg. “Foreign shoots help generate employment for locals,” Pius added. “I personally find that foreign crews are much more organised and their method of working is more detailed. They do their homework very well, and they know exactly what they want. If something is not allowed, they find ways to work around it.”
While feature films are cleared by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, the Ministry of External Affairs’ Publicity Division decides which documentary filmmakers may shoot in India. The process has become somewhat simpler for documentary directors: their proposals can now be cleared by Indian embassies and missions in their respective countries. The ministries promise, but rarely deliver, a response within three weeks.
“It can sometimes take up to two to three months to get permissions”, which can throw a shooting schedule out of whack, said Deborah Benattar, whose company, La Fabrique Films, was one of the organisations that has been talking to the films and television guild about the need for a single-window clearance department. “You have to reveal the exact locations and stick to them, and you can’t change a location because of logistical issues, such as, say, the weather.” If you decide to add a location or two, you need to file for a fresh shooting permit.
Benattar recently helped two French productions, Cow-Boys and Black Diamond, shoot in India, and she also complained about the fact that international film crews need to pay three times the rate to local technicians and labourers. “When Indians go aboard to shoot, they usually get incentives and tax rebates,” she noted. “India keeps promoting itself as a location abroad, and you say you welcome foreign shoots here, but then you should make the process easier. You need one entity to look at all the permissions, and you need a committee that can read scripts in two weeks.”
Tackling the bureaucracy
India has a continent’s worth of charms and a matching set of ministries, departments and sub-departments in charge of handing out shooting permits. The country’s notorious reputation for a slow-moving and corrupt bureaucracy and prickliness about its international image loom over every proposal, big and small.
There is often no consistency to who gets in and who doesn’t. Danny Boyle was allowed to shoot 2009’s Slumdog Millionaire in a country hyper-sensitive to the cinematic portrayal of its poverty. But the producers of the 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall were denied permission to shoot an action sequence on top of a moving train because the Railway Ministry felt India would be shown in a poor light. India’s loss was Turkey’s gain.
The more sensitive the subject, the longer the wait. Indian wildlife in general and tigers in particular, tribal areas, slums, caste politics, locations along any of the national borders, and political hot potatoes (Kashmir or Manipur, for instance) can result in delays or outright denials, say line producers.
One place where it is nearly impossible to shoot is the Alang shipbreaking yard in Gujarat because, as the location scout put it, “the labour practices are just appalling and they wouldn’t want the world to see it”.
Some of the reasons for turning down an application can be valid, such as a reality television shoot in an ecologically fragile zone. Well-regarded line producer Toby Sinclair, who has been in the game since 1980, remembers being approached by the company behind Bear Grylls’s survival shows to do a couple of episodes that involved Grylls being parachuted into a national park and surviving on whatever food was available on the ground.
“I said, no, and I put this down in writing: half of what they wanted to do was illegal,” said Sinclair, who has worked on several documentaries by the British Broadcasting Corporation and renowned naturalist David Attenborough set in India. “You can’t fly over a national park, and you can’t cut down leaves or bushes or whatever else you need to survive in the jungle. I wouldn’t ask for permissions even if the crew was pretending to do it.”
There are occasions when Kafka’s ghost surfaces, such as when permission for a documentary on the relationship between humans and animals in various countries was stalled last year for three months. The crew wanted to shoot cows and the Karni Mata rat temple in Bikaner. The reason it was denied approvals: the application used the phrase “holy cows”. The team eventually lost interest in filming in India.
Tricks of the trade
Local line producers, pejoratively known as “fixers”, come into the picture only after the scripts are cleared. The initial application letter itself, therefore, is vital in securing the ministry’s co-operation, said Shernaz Italia, one of the most seasoned producers in India who has, along with her partner Freny Khodaiji, handled numerous documentary shoots and Mira Nair productions, including Monsoon Wedding and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
“Basically, my expertise lies in two things: how to write a proposal, and patience,” Italia joked. “My general advice is to apply well in time, and to write an application in a way that is simple and straightforward. Ninety per cent of your battle is won in the way you write a proposal. Ask for more days than you actually require, especially if you are shooting at an archaeological site, and especially if it is the monsoon. Ask for more locations that you might actually need.”
Italia has been in the field since 1986, and she remembers a time when it would take months for projects to be cleared. “The time taken to get the general shooting permit has come down,” she observed. “Earlier, you had to have all the permits in place before you got the general permit. Now, you apply to the specific departments after you have the general permission in place.” The Environment Ministry is one place whose go-ahead is needed before embarking on a project.” The fact that Indian foreign missions have the authority to clear projects has also shortened the gap between intent and action, Italia added.
The circumstances in which documentaries and feature films are shot in India are vastly different – a fact that will have to be considered if a single-window clearance system is indeed set into place. “You need some distinction between feature films and documentaries – feature films can potentially disrupt the traffic, for instance, which we don’t do,” pointed out Amit Vachharajani, a veteran line producer in Mumbai. “Outside Bombay, people tend to be more relaxed, but on the streets here, everybody is a vigilante.”
There are rules for everything, but some of them are so general that they expose crews to harassment and corruption. “For instance, the application form for documentaries says that the producer needs to obtain local permits wherever necessary,” a location scout said on the condition of anonymity. “Of course we take the permissions when we are shooting at stations, airports or historical monuments, but what if I want to shoot the Victoria Terminus station in Mumbai from the outside for five minutes?”
It isn’t possible for documentary filmmakers to submit a list of locations to be covered and the shooting dates and timings in advance, given the fluid nature of the form, the scout pointed out.
For every bad experience India has had from crews, such as the French filmmakers who clandestinely made the documentary Organic Jarawa, on the endangered tribe in the Andamans last year, there are several genuine cases that get delayed or stymied because of governmental suspicion about their intentions. “In application forms, I remove any locations that are near national borders,” said a local line producer on the condition of anonymity. “I also avoid potentially tricky assignments altogether. Bad relations with the MEA’s External Publicity division can screw your career.”
Yet, the number of documentary filmmakers coming to India has only increased because of the deep interest in showcasing the country’s richness, the producer added.
“I have always believed in the system, however long it takes,” Italia said. “You can get permission to shoot even at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, for instance, if you follow the procedure. This is the house of the president, after all. If you wanted to shoot at the Buckingham Palace, do you think you would get permission to shoot in two days?”
Single-window clearance might work for feature films, but documentaries still need to be passed by the External Affairs Ministry as well as various state government departments, Toby Sinclair said. “For instance, what happens when you want to make a documentary on the East India Company?” he said. “It’s a controversial history, and you can’t argue with history but only learn from it. Who makes the decision and who handles the clearances?”
Different payment slabs
There is also no clarity on how a single-window clearance system will address the differential payment slabs that come into force for international productions. They must pay three times the going local rate to Indian technicians, and opinions are divided on this practice too. “I totally agree with this practice,” Italia said. “When you have a budget of a few million, what are a few hundred rupees? Why don’t you bring all your technicians here in that case, and pay their airfare and hotel charges? If you can take Indians who do the same work as your crew, why not you pay them international rates?”
Here too, like with permissions, international productions and their local handlers need to deal with different profession-based guilds across states, depending on where the shoot is taking place.
One of the leading unions, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees, used to be a de facto single window clearance body when it came to hiring local talent before other bodies sprang up over the past few years, said FWICE Secretary Dilip Pitwa. “There are several unions affiliated to political parties that have nothing to do with the film industry, and some of them disrupt shoots by asking questions about visas and permissions,” Pitwa said. “As a federation, we support single window clearance.” The FWICE claims a membership of 2.5 lakh members.
On the issue of differential payments, Pitwa is clear that the system is fair and necessary. “It is much cheaper for foreign crews to shoot here, and our members work exclusively for them for as long as the shoot lasts,” he said. Although Indian crews get tax breaks and concessions to shoot in foreign countries, they are spending more in terms of foreign exchange, Pitwa contended.
West is best
Despite the unequal foreign exchange rates, Indian film crews that travel abroad find the process far more attractive than back home. They are wooed with tax breaks and other financial concessions and get their location permissions from a single authority.
Producer Miriam Joseph spent over a decade bringing BBC crews to India and then working in Mumbai with the Bollywood company Excel Entertainment. Her first big foreign shoot was for Farhan Akhtar’s Don in Malaysia in 2006. All permissions were given by a single central agency called Puspal. “You put in your application along with the script, it gets sent to all the departments--religious affairs, police, external affairs, and so on--- and once you get your clearance, you can literally close your eyes and get the shoot done,” Joseph said. “After that, unless you are asking for something ridiculous or outrageous, the permissions mean that all the concerned government departments are supposed to co-operate. For a country that barely has a film industry, they have all the infrastructure in place.”
George Pius has shot various films in parts of the US, where the local films commissions are “very helpful”, and “put you on to good location managers”. He added, “When I wanted a location for a film that wasn’t on their list, they sent somebody over and sorted it out. We had to block off an entire road for an accident scene, and it was done. Of course, we paid a fee for it, but it was all very efficient. There is less paperwork and lot of it is online.”
European countries also have national and regional film commissions, which facilitate location shooting and offer incentives in exchange for providing their locals employment and showcasing tourism, Joseph said. “These countries believe that there is an industry that is worth growing, but in India, because we already have so many industries, the government doesn’t feel the need to extend time and energy on what could be a serious revenue earner,” she said. “We have so much more to offer in terms of places, stories and really skilled manpower. Yet we choose to do very little.”
Individual states such as Goa and Rajasthan are widely regarded as having done more than others to help international productions and earn goodwill and revenue. “Rajasthan has no indigenous movie culture, but hundreds of crews come there, and its tourism department has been doing whatever it can to make things easier,” Joseph said. The problem, as with so much else in India, is about replicating a successful local example on the national level.
“The problem is of reciprocity – you cannot advertise India as a place to shoot and then make permissions difficult and charge three times the rate,” Deborah Benattar said. “This is the reality and nobody tells you that in advance.”