Independent Bengali Cinema

Kolkata being the motherland of Bengali cinema also evolved it’s share of Independent film makers over the last decades. Though quite an uphill task to generate adequate funds to independently produce and create films which is then perceived to have no audience value, the film makers are not ready to go by the trends set by the industry and give up on their art form.

Independent film making has come a long way since 1919, when four of the leading figures in American silent cinema (Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith) in a protest of the autocracy of the studio system, formed a group called United Artists, which became the first independent studio in America. Since then there have been films on very low budgets, without stars and without support from any major studio. Many a significant feature-length as well as short film has been made via such low budget and independent productions. They have made the low-budget filmmaking to be recognized internationally. The latest important development in this arena has certainly been the concept of crowd funding which is a method, where a filmmaker puts up his creative project in front of the common people, who contribute according to their capacities to raise the fund for the film. Though a novel method, there is a constant challenge to make ends meet in this, which may jeopardize the entire project at any point of time.

Late in the last decade, Anamitra Roy, a student of Jadavpur University film studies department founded a group called ‘Little Fish Eats Big Fish’ along with his filmmaker friends. This was to express the purpose of making no budget (films with negligible budget often through personal contributions) films.  It is probably not widely known that Anamitra acted as the pioneer for introducing the no-budget filming concept in India. He made a few acclaimed short films like ‘Jean Luc Godard had no script’, ‘Memories of a Dead Township’ using this model. Next he turned his focus on directing a full length feature jointly with his wife Sriparna, who has had experience of directing surrealist short films like ‘Replica’. To realize this dream, they set up a fundraising initiative titled, ‘One Rupee Film Project’ and launched it  at a film festival in Orissa where one could contribute as little as one rupee for a multilingual movie Aashmani Jawaharat (Diamonds in the Sky) was the movie they kicked off the initiative for and began shooting shortly after, and by a few months were able to raise rupees two lakh eighty five thousand via crowd funding, both offline as well as through websites such as Wishberry, funduzz.com and Indiegogo. About 250 contributors have supported the project so far. The duo released the first look of the film on YouTube followed by a promotional video later.

Crowd Funding

The concept of crowd funding appeals to regional filmmakers as there is an emotional affinity to a crowd funded movie even before it is made. This also ensures a captive audience, thereby mitigating the risks of failure. To be sure, crowd funding is not new to Indian cinema. In 1976, celebrated filmmaker Shyam Benegal made Manthan by collecting Rs 2 each from lakhs of dairy farmers in Gujarat. More than three decades later, director Onir set a precedent for indipendent filmmakers, when he collected rupees one crore, or a third of  the total budget for his film ‘I Am’. The movie, which explored serious issues such as child abuse and same-sex relationships, received national awards in two categories and encouraged many other independent filmmakers to look at crowd funding to make movies on offbeat topics. The trend is now gaining traction. More and more independent filmmakers, particularly in regional cinema, have started reaching out to people through social media or online crowd funding platforms such as Wishberry and Catapooolt. These platforms charge a fee that differs from portal to portal. Wishberry, for instance, takes Rs 1,000 upfront as fee for creative campaign development services and 10 per cent of the final amount raised on a project.

Technological developments have helped independent filmmakers drastically cut costs while they have more options than ever before to earn revenue. A film’s life doesn’t end with its theatrical release, as it is now available on home videos and on the Internet. A digital print release can cut expenses by as much as 80 per cent with data proving how non-theatrical distribution of Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi and South Indian films have increased 15 to 20 per cent in the past year. Regional movies also offer a higher return on investment with a lower risk with two prominent trends.Hollywood films are being dubbed in Hindi and regional languages two, Hollywood as well as Bollywood studios are producing more regional films.  Even the best Bollywood films sometimes pale in comparison to their regional counterparts, which are grittier and made on a much smaller budget.

But theres a downside – regional or low budget Indian films  from Bengal like Tasher Desh or Bakita Bektigoto might be receiving accolades in international film festivals around the world, but are finding it difficult to reach out to the audiences back home. Absence of coherent industry regulation, lack of governmental support to showcase low budget or documentary films and the acute fund crunch that is adversely affecting  independent filmmaking. Around the time when the film fraternity has celebrated 100 years of Indian Cinema, film making is still not recognised as a form of art and culture. While Bollywood is splurging crores on popular commercial movies, independent film makers in regional industries are finding it difficult to source money and are often cash trapped. Even national award winning off beat movies are not slotted on prime time in Doordarshan and are pushed to graveyard slots, and multiplexes tend to push documentary movies in the morning shows, so the private television channels must come up to support these films. In addition to this, the government must support these movies by showcasing them on governmental theatres. The other aspect being the industry regulations which often tamper with the process of film making. In Tollygunge film industry, the film maker has to engage  a minimum of 50 local technicians even if your film budget doesn’t permit.

Marketing

While the nature of the stories have changed with independent cinema, other aspects are still fraught with old challenges. Once a movie is made, it just lies waiting for some Prince Charming distributor to pick it up. For films to be distributed and earn money, they still need to have stars. One reason distributors offer  for not helping indie films is that they still aren’t drawing enough people to theatres. However, filmmakers complain that often films lose audiences because they aren’t advertised enough. But with promotion costs often running into four times an indie film’s budget, they’re understandably hard to promote too. Independent Bengali films depend on word of mouth publicity and usually start pulling in crowds after the second week. Even if such films are screened in Bengal’s multiplexes, they will be pulled out of the halls if they fail to fill up the halls in the first week. Any trade has a system, similarly art is also a vocation. When you decide to be an artiste you are already deciding that you don’t want the comfort that someone else has.

Most Bengali independent filmmakers say the problem with the distributor is that he acts as the spokesperson for what the audience wants. The distributor filters films even before the audience gets a chance to see them. The answer is perhaps to have film festivals that are not just cultural events, but connect distributors as well as the audiences to the films. International film festivals play that role. They help develop a taste in the audience. There’s no such body here, so the only people deciding what the audience supposedly wants, are distributors.

The general idea is that feature films are difficult to make. But, it is the short films which are much more difficult to make. The kind of India and the visual appeal that these films are providing a regular, mainstream film never can. Short films will redefine the future of Indian cinema and not some mainstream one whose fate is decided on a Friday night. In fact shorts have already redefined it, so to speak and, are offering us perspectives that big-ticket cinema hardly does. More private initiatives will offer platforms to young, independent filmmakers to showcase their work, which would be hard to come by otherwise. Most independent filmmakers want to make short films, using even phones or other means but do not have platform to showcase them. The audience they are able to reach today wasn’t just possible before the Internet. Google with its YouTube, perhaps the biggest archive present today have given this platform to the short filmmakers and he said, if a revenue model can be worked out here, then we can change things.

India is in flux and so is filmmaking in Bengal. And it’s not an organized and controlled flux akin to other countries, it is leaps and hops, spurts and bursts, backwards and forwards. The Bengali Indian Independent film world is somewhat similar at the moment with the unique privilege to document our society at a time like no other, to not only commune with each other but also commune with our audience. To tell them that we don’t know how to deal with this stuff either, but here’s a story about it, we are all in this together.