Supermen in Malegaon and a film within a film

While assisting Bollywood filmmakers in Mumbai, documentary filmmaker Faiza Ahmad heard about the ‘cinema fanatics’ from the town of Malegaon, and decided to film them while they were in the process of filmmaking. She says she got lucky with her directorial debut, as it was pitched before a bunch of producers in Singapore on one day, and she had the funds for the film in hand on day 2.
While it took four years to find a distributor for the film in India, her documentary “Supermen Of Malegaon” has won awards at various international film festivals in Rome, Singapore and Los Angeles in that period. Here’s how this film came about, what Malegaon’s cinema is like and Faiza’s involvement in the process of making this film.
These people are uneducated or just paanchvi paas
It’s a documentary on the people of Malegaon, an industrial town, and these people are largely power loom workers who are obsessed with films. So they’ve learnt how to make films just by watching them. They have no formal training, some of them are not even educated or they are just paanchvi paas. But they love films so much that they’ve started making them. They’ll take a concept and localize it. Superman, in this film, is trying to destroy a guy who is planning to establish a gutka empire in Malegaon. They made “Malegaon Ke Sholay” about 10 years ago – they had a small camera and they just went and shot this film. Since then, they have been making many of these remakes, including “Malegaon Ki Lagaan”. That’s largely because cinema is their only form of entertainment; there’s nothing else for people to do. So every Friday (Friday is a holiday there) after the jumma namaaz, people throng to the theatres. They watch old Bollywood films also, like the old “Agneepath” will be running there and it will still go houseful.
It's Mithun VS Amitabh fans
Mithun has a huge fan following there, and people will dress up like him. There are about 200-300 dedicated fans who’ll have haircuts like Mithun. They’ll all go to watch the film together and the Mithun fans will sit on one side and the Amitabh fans on the other, and then they’ll repeat all the dialogues as they are spoken on screen. They’ll also take firecrackers inside the theatre. In fact, the cinema halls in Malegaon have these boards that say, ‘patakhay le jaana mana hai’.
Bollywood films too business driven
I was assisting on a film in Mumbai when I read about these guys. The way films are made here – they’re so driven by business. So when I read about these guys in Malegaon who’re doing films just for the love of it, that they didn’t care about the money, I got interested. The whole town chips in, everyone acts or helps with something or the other. You can walk into anyone’s house and shoot. It’s a community effort, all because they love film.
Making the film easy, distribution hard
I went to Malegaon, met these guys, came back, met my co-producer in Bombay (who also ended up shooting the film) and he knew about these guys in Singapore – they are called the Asian Pitch. They invite proposals for documentaries from all over Asia and select three films every year to fund. We went to Singapore for two days – we pitched the idea on day 1 and the second day we had the money. It was that fast. I have never done this in my life; this is my first film. I’ve only heard of how difficult it is to get funding but here, we had the money in two days. I’ve been very lucky. A month later, we were in Malegaon, shooting.
The shoot was a little difficult, in the sense that we were just observing what they were doing, we didn’t really have a script to follow. We knew that we wanted to follow the process of how they make these films and also because they are such interesting characters, we wanted to follow their lives, but there was nothing set. We didn’t know exactly what we wanted out of them. So we would just go there, shoot and sort of take what we got that day. Some days it was very frustrating because nothing would happen and we were following so many strands, we didn’t know which one would be the more interesting one. But I suppose that’s part of the process that came together at the editing table – you finally sit with everything that you have and you cull out what you need from that.
Then the distribution channels are very limited for us and we have to constantly create spaces for ourselves to have these screenings; we have to form film clubs. Distributors need to realize that there is cinema which maybe will not get them revenues like a Bollywood film will, but for the sake of cinema they should also create a space.
In this case, fact was more unbelievable than fiction
The subject was so interesting; but there was no way that I could make a fiction film out of this. The characters are interesting and you cannot recreate something like that. In this case, it is about fact being more unbelievable than fiction. What we were witnessing, there was no way to recreate that – that fact that it was happening live and we were being able to document that – that just made for a far better film than a fiction film would have, on this topic at least. And I think it has reached a lot more people than it would have initially. I don’t think we should be even comparing this to the kind of audience that a Bollywood film will have. To be honest, every film does not need that kind of an audience. Even within that large space, if there are smaller spaces where other kind of films can co-exist, it’s good enough. And I think cinema in India needs that – you need to have many small spaces.
People joined the film for love of it
Some known faces in Bollywood also joined the film because they liked what they saw and so they wanted to do something with the film. Sneha Khanwalker (of “Gangs Of Wasseypur” and “Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!” fame) came on board first and she loved it. She agreed to do music for it and then we got Hitesh Soni (who lent his voice for the music of “Kaminey” and “Omkara”) as well. No one is doing it for the money – they liked the idea; they liked the stuff that the people in Malegaon were doing. Even the guy who shot the movie went on to shoot “My Friend Pinto”. Our editor recently edited “Gangs Of Wasseypur” and “That Girl In Yellow Boots”. It’s a talented bunch who worked on this film – and it was for the love of it.
Bollywood is an over-hyped part of Indian cinema
I think Bollywood is just a very over-hyped part of Indian cinema, it definitely is not doing the best quality of cinema that India is producing. The regional films are so much better. The documentaries in India are far better than the fiction films that are made in Bollywood. There is just too much hype about Bollywood here.