Art & Entertainment

Learner’s Licence

Debutant directors and their small films are winning accolades

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Learner’s Licence
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Bollywood’s New Wave

  • International Recognition:  Peepli Live impresses at Sundance, Udaan flies high at Cannes and Dhobi Ghat and Harud chosen for Toronto film festival
  • Surprise Successes: Underdog movies Tere Bin Laden and LSD win the box-office game
  • Big Backers: From superstar Aamir Khan to soap queen Ekta Kapoor, they’re putting their bucks into alternative cinema
  • Small is not Tiny: Budgets rising, huge investments on promotion and publicity
  • New Money: Newer modes of financing including a Facebook-aided cooperative model
  • Online Viewers: India’s first online theatre, dingora.com, showcases fringe films

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When producers Pooja Shetty Deora and Arti Shetty of Walkwater Films decided to put their money on Abhishek Sharma’s debut film, Tere Bin Laden, little did they realise that a proverbial pot of gold was waiting for them. Even before the theatre release of the film—boasting of no big stars—the satellite TV rights had been grabbed for a tidy sum. Pooja won’t reveal who bought the rights, leave alone the amount. However, she does admit that she was “pleasantly surprised” and that the money was “beyond expectations”. “Normally the satellite rights are negotiated after a film’s release depending on its box-office performance. Here they were betting on it even before the crucial Friday,” says Pooja.

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In retrospect, the confidence doesn’t seem misplaced. In a week dominated by a worldwide monster hit—Christopher Nolan’s Inception—TBL managed to draw in a substantial audience. In the first three days itself, the film had grossed over Rs 5 crore from 300-odd prints. What’s more, TBL is the third off-mainstream film to have caught viewers’ imaginations this year. Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya was the first profit-maker of 2010 followed by Dibakar Banerjee’s cult favourite, Love Sex Aur Dhokha.

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Love Sex Aur Dhoka

Money is not the only indication of success; alternate films have been earning critical acclaim too, and have made a name for themselves internationally. Earlier this year, Anusha Rizvi’s upcoming Peepli Live was chosen for the Sundance Film Festival, the mecca of independent cinema. Then Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan was picked up for the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. Last heard, selectors for the Toronto film festival were floored by Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat, likely to be the Indian highlight at the festival in September. Last heard, Aamir Bashir’s set-in-Kashmir directorial debut Harud (Autumn) had also been selected for Toronto. The thing to notice here is that save LSD, all these films are from debutant directors.

Commercial and even critical success apart, new wave Bollywood cinema has also been witnessing some defining changes over the last year. From superstar Aamir Khan to soap queen Ekta Kapoor, big guns are backing projects by untested, untried filmmakers. Besides, the vanguard duo of the Indie movement, Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj, have also turned producers for such films, with the obvious intent of building and nurturing a whole network of young talent around them.

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Peepli Live

So what is it about fringe cinema that appeals to hard-nosed business people like Pooja, Ekta or Aamir? Aamir, in a press conference, claimed it was the sheer ingenuity and freshness of the idea that drove him to back Peepli Live. Pooja says it’s not about following any specific business model (although her second venture, Renuka Shahane’s Marathi film Rita, has also been a modest one). It’s the concept, not the commercial possibilities, that gets her excited, she maintains. Ekta, however, stresses that she is investing in a growing market. “It might be niche but is low-risk and delivers assured returns,” she explains. For her Dibakar’s LSD was cost-effective, high concept, innovative cinema that “helped establish our brand in the market”. Ekta’s next is a satire called Shor, on urban noises, directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K.

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But the flip side of having big backers on board is that small cinema is no longer as tiny as it used to be. Budgets have been on the rise, driven primarily by the huge investments stacked on promotion and publicity. The budget of  the “small” TBL was Rs 8.5 crore, including production, marketing, print and publicity. Peepli Live is reported to have a budget of Rs 12 crore. LSD was made on a shoestring budget with digital cameras but the publicity budget was more than the production costs.

The producers, however, see merit in this. “More than the big-ticket films, it’s the small films that need awareness creation. You have to plan how to take the film to the viewers. Both financial muscle and intelligence are required,” says Ekta. Compensating for the lack of big stars is another imperative. “You have to spend extra on creating basic visibility. It’s not a good idea to have small marketing plans for small films,” says Pooja.

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Udaan

Her marketing team was involved with the film from the scripting stage, which ensured a strong initial buzz. Teasers shown with films like My Name is Khan and Raajneeti built word-of-mouth curiosity. Days before the film’s release, the “fake Osama”, a central character in the film, was on all the TV channels. “We sold it like a mainstream film, pumping up the idea,” says Abhishek. In comparison, Udaan, a little gem of a film released the same week, was ignored due to lack of hype. No wonder Abhishek says filmmakers need to understand the dynamics of business as well as being creative. “We need to build on a parallel business formula,” he says.

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As though taking a cue from Abhishek, Onir, an established name in off-mainstream cinema, tried out a new financing formula for his forthcoming film I Am. It’s a cooperative model that uses Facebook as a facilitator. “We put in 50 per cent of the production cost and used FB to ask people to contribute the rest. Those who pitched in with Rs 1,000 were made co-owners and the ones with bigger contributions are co-producers,” says Onir, adding, “it was humbling to see unknown people trusting you”.

Another significant experiment which could radically change the small cinema landscape is dingora.com. Started by Pankaj Sikka, an LA-based IT engineer, dingora can be best described as an online cinema theatre. “With dingora, small movies can focus on using the internet to reach out to the widest possible audience on the very weekend of release for absolutely zero cost,” says Sikka. In this model, the viewer pays each time he sees the film—the price of a “ticket” to be decided by the filmmaker—and the revenue is shared between the website and the filmmaker, with the majority going to the latter. So far, dingora has showcased films like Pankaj Advani’s Urf Professor and Jaideep Verma’s Leaving Home. More are soon to follow. Time to pack in small films in your laptop, literally.

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