The Hindu Business Line : Goa sure has it

It is all very well to acquire a permanent venue in one of the most scenic places in the country. Goa has some of the world's best beaches. It is a huge tourist destination, especially in season that lasts between November and February. At the 36th International Film Festival of India, the air is redolent with feni and fish. Everywhere you look, along the riverfront in front of the Inox multiplex building where the screenings are on, as well as the media centre in the nearby Kala Akademy, there are little street-food kiosks and local bands playing lovely local ditties. Once the sun has set and the movies are done, the action moves to the parties, where delegates and the media mingle, and much merriment ensues.

But, as entertainment czars know well, the real business is done far away from the fun and the frolic. The power and prestige of a film festival is in the presence of the world's most influential buying heads of movies, something that happens at Cannes, which Goa is trying to model itself on. But judging by the stalls on the lawns of the Kala Akademy, most of which lay forlorn through the 10-day festival, except for the mandatory throngs when former minister of I&B, Jaipal Reddy, inaugurated the Film Market, it is sadly evident that the IFFI is not the place where the movie moghuls throng.

The two-day seminar on `The Big Picture' saw top entertainment heads chinwagging on how India could become a magnet for global filmmaking enterprise. And all of them, including Bobby Bedi as head of the CII national entertainment committee, Manmohan Shetty, the man behind Adlabs, and a big player both in film production and exhibition, such directors as Nagesh Kukunoor and John Mathew Mathan, felt that India has the potential to become a huge entertainment hub, provided some crucial factors are taken care of.

Nothing in India moves without political will, even entertainment, as the making and distributing of movies is governed by all manner of restrictions and stringent laws. The divide between creative people and the people who bankroll them is never as visible as it is at forums like these, where money becomes the cornerstone in the creation of software. What the movie industry needs is less ineffectual laws, and much more support.

Reeling out a host of thought-provoking facts and figures, Amit Khanna, president of the Film and TV Producers Guild of India, claimed that India is on the verge of a `cataclysmic change'. In the next few years, 70 per cent of movie-watching Indians would be below 25 years, which means the movies, which are already skewed to this demographic, would become more and more youth-oriented. The change that Khanna spoke of would be ushered in by adherence to rights in two areas; intellectual property and Internet protocol.

Piracy is the one thing that everyone present kept returning to. The loss of revenue to determined pirates is estimated to be several hundred crores, which probably takes a huge chunk of the film openings. If India could be rid of its pirates, a lot of the international players who have kept away may feel better inclined towards it.

Bobby Bedi made a powerful comment when he recounted a young filmmaker telling him that even a few years ago, there was no money for someone like him to make the movies he wanted to make. Things have changed so much, said this aspirant, that now they have the money, but no scripts.

This business of content creation, which leads to both revenue and entertainment, is the undercurrent that runs through all self-respecting film festivals. At the 36th IFFI, this thread kept surfacing, especially when young filmmakers spoke of the work they were presenting at the festival, and the manner in which they got there, both creatively and financially. At one such session, Madhur Bhandarkar, whose National Award winning Page 3 attracted massive crowds, talked of how the money, which was so hard to come by, has become a little easier now. He began his Bollywood innings with a little-known movie called Trishakti, which came and went. (This writer remembers seeing it, and was profoundly sorry for the experience, so bad was the film.) Then Bhandarkar came up with the Rs 1.5-crore Chandni Bar, which earned him lots of critical acclaim, as well as some money: he managed to talk Tabu into doing the movie, based on the life of bar-girls in Mumbai. And now that bars have been banned in Mumbai, Chandni Bar has acquired cult status too!

For Page 3, he talked his financier from London into parting with Rs 2.5 crore, telling him that if the movie bombed, he could consider the sum lost at a Las Vegas casino. The film, which went on to make ten times that amount, was the first Bollywood hit of the year. The important thing is that his Mr Moneybags was willing to gamble that sum on a film, which let the director do his own thing. The script was kept undiluted, and the director's vision intact.

Now for his next film, Bhandarkar has managed to get much more. Corporate, which delves into the tortuous ways of the corporate world, is in keeping with the director's penchant for making movies on current, socially relevant subjects. On small budgets, you have the freedom to experiment, he says.

A truism all filmmakers, who have tried to incorporate difference in their movies, especially since the small-film movement gathered momentum, have come to. Stars can help jack up the money producers might want to invest, and it may get the returns back soon, but the film, more often than not, becomes a star-vehicle, not a director's story.

At the end of the second edition of the IFFI in Goa, the answer to `is Goa the best place for the IFFI' veers towards the positive. Yes, as long as the infrastructure, both of the festival as well as the movie industry, improves by leaps and bounds. Yes, as long as co-productions can flower between movie-making countries. And a resounding yes, as long as Goa is as warm and welcoming.

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