Film Bazaar: Appetite growing for Indian cinema

It’s been a year of triumphs, surprises and controversy for India’s indie cinema, starting at Cannes where four titles, including Indo-European co-productions Monsoon Shootout and The Lunchbox, played in various sections of the festival.

Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox was the was the breakout hit of the festival, selling to around 37 territories including the Sony Pictures Classics for North America, and later grossing $5m on its Indian theatrical release through Disney UTV.

The romantic drama was also part of the controversy when it lost out to Gujarati road movie The Good Road as India’s Oscar submission, despite having formidable international marketing machinery behind it. However, The Lunchbox is now at the cusp of an unprecedented global rollout for a non-Bollywood Indian film.

Disney UTV also successfully released Anand Gandhi’s Ship Of Theseus in India over the summer. The philosophical drama was launched at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and went on to win several prizes on the festival circuit.

Anup Singh’s Qissa is following a similar trajectory this year – launched at Toronto 2013, where it won the Netpac prize, it has also scooped a Silver Gateway at the Mumbai film festival and best actress at Abu Dhabi. The film was also sold to Canada’s Studio Film Group by The Match Factory, which is also handling The Lunchbox.

All these titles were either developed through or raised finance at Film Bazaar, the annual co-production market, screenwriting lab and work-in-progress workshop that takes place in Goa.

When the event was launched by the National Film Development Corp (NFDC) seven years ago, it was met with a wave of skepticism from local filmmakers and industry professionals who didn’t see how a series of meetings on the shores of the Arabian sea could help their projects. Now the event is inundated with applications.

The shift in perception is due to what NFDC has managed to achieve in a relatively short space of time. A few years back, films that had passed through the various strands of Film Bazaar started to draw interest from film festivals and international sales agents. NFDC funding programmes also helped films such as The Lunchbox, The Good Road and Qissa get made.

This year the buzz has started to translate into actual sales and distribution. The Lunchbox, which NFDC co-produced, opens in Germany on Nov 21 and in Italy, France and Benelux in December. Ship Of Theseus was released by Australia’s Mindblowing Films on Nov 7 and will open in the US next year through Indiememe.

Back at home, B.A Pass, a Film Bazaar work-in-progress project in 2011, grossed $2m on its Indian release through Bharat Shah’s VIP Films. The film was recently re-released due to audience demand and has been dubbed into Tamil for South India distribution.

The Lunchbox and Ship Of Theseus both presented by high-profile Indian filmmakers on their local release – which helped build buzz, secure screens and convince theatres to give the films a decent run. Karan Johar agreed to throw his weight behind The Lunchbox, after seeing the film in Cannes, and Kiran Rao, filmmaker and wife of superstar Aamir Khan, stepped in to support Ship Of Theseus.

Both films added screens following their initial release – The Lunchbox ended up on 600 screens and Ship Of Theseus on almost 90 screens.

“Its not just about having a big name attached – you need the right name. Karan is associated with love stories and The Lunchbox was marketed as a romance. He convinced a lot of people to see the film,” says Batra.

Gandhi says that having a celebrity on board helped to expand the run of his film: “Theatre owners would have become impatient and taken it off before we had time to build word-of-mouth. But with Kiran, the buzz was building months before release.”

But while it’s encouraging that Indian indie films are securing distribution both in India and overseas, local filmmakers and industry professionals sound a note of caution. Not every non-Bollywood film is as audience-friendly as The Lunchbox or as original as Ship Of Theseus. There’s still a way to go before theatres and audiences can accept a diverse range of Indian content.

“We can’t say we’ve arrived yet – it’s going to take time,” says NFDC managing director Nina Lath Gupta. “So far we’ve managed to build up the acceptance of festivals, sales agents and distributors – but it’s the audience that is key.”

Filmmakers agree that challenges remain – particularly at home in India’s Bollywood-obsessed and heavily taxed theatrical landscape.

“Non-Bollywood films could benefit from better marketing and publicity campaigns, but that is easier said than done, because publicity budgets far exceed the production costs of these films,” says Bahl.

Gandhi points out that box office revenues can be taxed up to 45% in some states regardless of a film’s budget. “In other parts of the world, companies like ours would be partially funded by the state, but here we are heavily taxed by the state.”

With all these constraints, Indian filmmakers are starting to look seriously at alternate distribution platforms, including theatrical-on-demand, video-on-demand and other forms of online and mobile distribution.

Ship Of Theseus deployed a “vote for the film to release in your city” campaign when released in India, which Indiememe will also use in the US. Gupta says the NFDC is exploring every ancillary avenue through its Cinemas Of India distribution label: “We believe our films have a very long tail and, as broadband connectivity increases, we’ll see video-on-demand become a very big platform for our kind of films.”

Co-production market

Veteran Indian filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani are among the 22 directors with projects selected for Film Bazaar’s Co-production Market, along with promising new talents such as Kamal K.M., Rohit Pandey and Bikas Ranjan Mishra.

Currently enjoying festival succes with Qissa – The Tale Of A Lonely Ghost, Anup Singh is bringing Mantra – The Song Of Scorpions, a drama set in the deserts of Rajasthan, to Film Bazaar, while Marathi filmmaker Umesh Kulkarni is bringing road movie Highway.

International filmmakers with India-themed stories are also participating in the market, including the UK’s Robert Mullan, Poland’s Piotr Trzaskalski and Paris-based Valeria Sarmiento.

The line-up also includes two projects from South Asian women directors – Pakistan’s Sabiha Sumar (Silent Waters) who is bringing social drama The Invite, while Afghanistan’s Roya Sadat (Three Dots) is seeking post-production support for Warm Bread & The Nipple’s Circle.

Film Bazaar’s Work-in-Progress Lab, mentored by Marco Mueller, Derek Malcolm, Laurent Danielou and Philippa Campbell, has selected five projects including Kanu Behl’s Titli, produced by Dibakar Banerjee, which took part in the Co-Production Market last year.

The six writers taking part in Screenwriters Lab include Pune 52 director Nikhil Mahajan and award-winning DoP Shanker Raman (Frozen).

The Primexchange workshop, encouraging collaboration between Indian and European filmmakers, has selected ten projects for its fifth edition, along with guest project In Search Of A Miracle, a docudrama based on William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives.

Film Bazaar is also launching a new initiative this year – Producers’ Lab (Nov 21-23) – encompassing workshops, case studies and one-on-one meetings with local and international producers, sales agents, buyers and festival programmers.

Topics to be discussed include the role of a producer, the development procress, budgeting, financing, co-production and navigating film festivals and markets.

As usual, the market will also host industry screenings and the popular Film Bazaar Recommends screenings in the video room, along with the Knowledge Series of key note speeches and panel discussions.