Show Me The Movie

In today's digitised global village, being a denizen of a developing country can be arduous for someone who appreciates the finer things in life. Good world movies, for example. The trickle of world cinema into a country brought up on a staple diet of garish Bollywood fare and mostly unwatchable mainstream regional movies is exciting, certainly. However, for a certain section of the populace, which has an eye for good cinema, the options streaming in are too little too late.
Consider the fate of movies such as Borat, Volver and the Saw series, which failed to find a theatre release in India.Shyam Shroff of Shringar Films, who brought down Khuda Kay Liye from Pakistan to Mumbai, proffers an explanation: the investment is far too much for the minuscule audience the cinema caters to. "The foreign studio, going by the size of this country, demands humongous amounts of money when in actual fact the percentage of people that enjoys these films is negligible. Add to this the overheads���sub-titling, cutting the scenes outed by the censors and re-mastering the movie, duty charges on the film reel and the price of publicity���and you see why many good movies don't get a theatre release in India." Because of this, crowd-pullers like Spiderman, the Jackie Chan flicks, and the Harry Potter and Narnia series get preference for screening in the country and run roughshod over other genres of cinema.
Little wonder then that alternate cinema, in its original big-screen glory, is more elusive than fashionable in India. Abhijeet Ahluwalia, 20, who likes to call his sense of movies above the ruck, says he has no option but to download his movies and TV series from P2P websites. "There are no other options if you're a film enthusiast," he gripes. "Once you hear about a certain good movie, you have no clue when it will be released here. If it is, people like Pratibha Naithani and the censors play spoilsport by deleting the most important scenes in the film if they contain violence or nudity. Sometimes, like Night At The Museum, only an atrocious dubbed Hindi version of the movie is released. It's the same with television shows like LOST and House. One has to wait for aeons for the channels to pick up a season after it has been aired in the US." Ahluwalia's disillusionment began after he watched the Tom Cruise starrer Minority Report in a theatre and only understood the significance of the title after watching it later on television because someone had cut the most important part of the movie.
This is where DVD pirates, cinema's rum runners, come into the frame, acting as colligates for desperate movie lovers. Salim, operating out of the busy D N Road in Mumbai, shows off an enviable collection of pirated DVDs lining his small thela. Spanish, German and Russian films along with the Saw series with all the four movies stocked inside a single DVD and other assorted unreleased movies make for an impressive list. Although he cannot pronounce the titles of most of the movies on display, he is quick to add, "Lot of customers come looking for these foreign movies. I sell at least eight DVDs a day on an average, and it will go up to 20 when colleges re-open."
Of late, television channels and movie rental services have been cashing in on the growing interest in world movies. Two new channels of media behemoths, one already launched, will screen only world movies. But there's a hitch here. Most of the movies available are either easily available classics or unimaginative and obscure movies Indian audiences don't have the patience for. And cinema enthusiasts aren't pleased. "There are MBAs sitting in the offices of these new world movie channels who are hardly driven by a love for movies. That is why bad programming is killing off even the select few people who like watching good foreign cinema. You have to nurture an audience that watches a particular kind of cinema," says Jimmy Mistry, vice-president of Enlighten Society which screens classic movies.
Even acclaimed Oscar awardees like There Will Be Blood, Juno or the dark 4 Months 3 Weeks And 2 Days, Romania's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at last year's Oscars only came to India after they had been honoured. For cinema lovers, this is a rude joke on the part of distributors. Rental companies, however, claim they try to gauge the mood of their customers and bring in titles accordingly. Sameer Guglani, vice-president, corporate strategy, for seventymm.com says, "There is a lot happening in the foreign movie market right now. A lot of companies like Excel and Sony are buying good movies, and we are developing a strong bond with home distribution networks." He then adds, "There is a certain time lag between a movie release and its availability here. But that is really the I&B ministry's fault. They expect too much and a lot of movies are stuck with them. There is also a lack of real data about release dates of movies here. Everybody is working hard and the results will show soon," he claims, casually flipping a carrot at alternate cinema lovers.
The scene on television is no different. Special seasons are allotted to classic movies on English movie channels and shown on a pro-rata basis for a small time, and then it's back to mindless movies. Channels don't have any specific strategy to bring in movies that find no theatre release in India. Or, as the new world movie channel on air shows, they are pretty unimaginative. When quizzed about it, Sunder Aaron, business head, Sony Pix says, "The increasing number of channels for special movies is an encouraging sign, even if they are our competitors. And with pay-per-view and DTH penetrating corners of the country, things will improve soon." Aaron has been in the business for around 15 years in various continents and also feels piracy is less in the UK and US because of the quickness with which content is made available in those areas.
Nothing will change the status quo unless the revenue model of the system begins to favour studios that have the rights of movies. However, every player in the business has the same message. "The future is bright," they all proclaim peppily and suspiciously. After all, this is India. All good things only happen in the future here.
priyanko.sarkar@timesgroup.com