Kurosawa, Godard get a booster shot

Bollywood writer-director Anurag Kashyap maintains that if you want to savour `real' cinema, it exists in a space between Hollywood and Bollywood.
What's more, Kashyap is delighted that channels like NDTV Lumiere and UTV World Movies and groups like Palador Pictures are promoting foreign language films in a systematic, regular way. For cineastes across India, there's no need to wait for those rare film festivals that flicker into town once a year.
What's interesting is that the movement to promote world cinema, once the preserve of consulates and film festivals, is gathering strength.A new phenomenon called Destination Cinema is now on the cards. This initiative will bring Chinese, Italian, Spanish, German, French, Austrian, Australian, Polish, Moroccan and other language films to India with regular release patterns.
Earlier, world cinema found a slot at international film festivals held in Goa, Trivandrum, Kolkata and Pune. Old faithfuls such as the Alliance Francaise, Cultural Centre of Russia and Max Mueller Bhuvan brought in French, Russian and German cinema packages totally free of cost for cine lovers in the metros.
"The Indian cinema audience has been familiar with the work of world masters like Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Kurosawa and other prominent world masters,'' says Sunil Doshi, director of Lumiere.
A trade source says the biggest challenge is financesince world cinema still has a niche audience, costs are steep and returns low. Even NDTV Lumiere or Palador is able to bring only one or two prints of a European or Chinese film because each print costs around Rs 95000, licensing fee included. An insider says, "At the end, after deducting the distributors commission, the company that imports these films barely makes Rs 15,000.''
To give the importing companies an incentive, multiplex chains like PVR, Fame and Inox in Mumbai, PVR in Delhi, Satyam in Chennai and Nandan in Kolkata have aligned themselves to the movement and decided to dedicate one screen only for world cinema. "This way when you walk into one of these theatres in the evening, you get a chance to catch a screening of something offbeat,'' says a multiplex manager.
Doshi says that the whole idea of Destination Cinema is to bring the cultures of new countries to Indian audiences. "Hollywood with its money power can bombard theatres across the globe, but European cinema needs nurturing,'' he says.