Art in Mart

rewind to the sepia-toned concept of a foreign film festival 20 years ago__and visualise the indian entry. your mind is bound to throw up the picture of a ponderous image in motion, sometimes dark and sometimes bleak, put together on a minimal budget, with all its cut corners showing. those were times when 'meaningful art' had nothing to do with money.which is another way of saying that those were times when moneyed films had nothing to do with meaningful art. or film festivals either. today, like all things sepia-toned, the concept of film festivals has changed in india. for, film-makers around the country have suddenly realised that 'entertaining films' are not the square peg in the round hole of film festivals, as they had imagined. they have, in fact, realised that film festivals have never been a round hole at all__they have always adapted themselves to pegs of every shape. so today, they're all off to the festivals: lagaan, asoka, et al, rubbing shoulders with daughters of the century, deham, monsoon wedding, et al. and david dhawan stands a fair chance too. it indicates the opening up of the film festival circuit, with film-makers applying to and attending foreign festivals independently, instead of through the official channelling sources__the directorate of film festivals (dff) and, to some extent, the national film development corporation (nfdc). "that's a positive change. but i would like to point out that we didn't keep commercial cinema out, commercial film-makers stayed out thinking that festivals are for 'those art guys'!" argues deepankar mukhopadhyay, md, nfdc. "if aamir khan and shah rukh khan came to us with their films, we would have considered their films too, like anyone else's." "that's true. unfortunately it's also true that these bodies only create a lopsided development through their selection process. for their selection committee comprises people of a certain profile, who only push for elitist, esoteric cinema, thus leaving overall entertaining films behind," shrugs nittin keni, ex-nfdc official, perhaps better known today as producer of gadar (which, incidentally, didn't make the grade either). "mainstream film-makers have figured out the unfairness of this only recently." and are doing everything in the book (and outside too) to vault the system. beginning with going through unofficial rather than official channels. "the problem with official channels is that they have to be 'equally fair' to every region and language. so the main criterion for sending films to festivals becomes equal representation of every region and language, and not the actual quality of the film__which is what it should be!" says uma da cunha, programme consultant for indian films for the toronto, cannes, london, new york and palm springs festivals. programme consultants like da cunha help the various festival directors to trace and select new films by doing the ground research and getting film-makers in direct touch with them. thus giving a fair chance even to films not conceived by nfdc. the easy flow of information through the worldwide web has provided another means of sidestepping the system. where access to any film festival__beginning with the cannes festival and ending with the bite the mango bradford film festival__is just a click away. "fifteen years ago, when i made kamala, i too thought that the dff was the only means of showcasing my film abroad. but my film didn't go anywhere, perhaps because it wasn't sponsored by the nfdc," says jagmohan mundhra. "so this time, with bawandar, i preferred to depend on www.filmfestivals.com. this is a site where every film festival of every country is listed from a to z, along with the official websites of each festival. these websites in turn provide details of categories and submission dates, along with online registration forms. so all i did was fill in the forms and pay the registration fees online. this put me in direct touch with the festival directors." the result, like everything else in the it age, is immediate. mundhra has already shown his film at 20-odd film festivals (from london to zanzibar), won awards in many of them, and has a line-up of 20 more festivals to go until the end of the year! all this while his film was still stuck in the tangles of the indian censor board. "it is the change in attitude which is the main catalyst in all this," concedes govind nihalani, whose films have gone to festivals in the past through official channels. "earlier, we were neither interested nor aware that there could be so many festival options and so many ways of entering them. so we happily submitted to the government and to their unwritten rules like 'a film can't be sent to more than two festivals, so that all films get an equal chance', etc. but this opening up is positive because festival showing can enhance commercial prospects, especially for middle-of-the-road films. finally, the more the non-traditional markets open up and different kinds of distribution systems emerge, the better it is for indian cinema." after all, economics in india does say that films which win international recognition do better business here. little wonder then that asoka should be premiered in toronto, not mumbai.