‘Crowdfunding can help promote good cinema’

Independent filmmaker Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, who last week won the Kerala Government’s best director award for his crowdfunded Malayalam film Oralpokkam (or Six Feet High), is now turning producer with another film, taking the same route to funding.

The new film, titled  Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani , explores the contemporary moral and political ramifications of the death penalty. The title is inspired from a biblical verse in the Aramaic language, meaning ‘My God, why have you abandoned me?’ Jesus Christ had cried out “Eli Eli...’’ while dying on the Cross.

Sanal is the secretary of the Kazhcha Film Society, which produced Oralpokkam , raising funds from people using a crowdfunding platform, the social media and ‘bucket pirivu’ (collecting donations from a crowd in a plastic bucket). This time around, they are employing the same funding strategy. “Our objective behind making films is different and our business model is different, too,” Sanal told BusinessLine . “We make films for the people and we raise funds from the people. We find crowdfunding the best alternative to the conventional, way of financing filmmaking.”

Of the ₹25 lakh required for Oralpokkam , ₹19 lakh was raised through crowdfunding. “Those anonymous people who gave us money didn’t expect returns on their small investments; they believed in us and believed in good cinema,” Sanal says. “The artists and professionals involved in Oralpokkam had all worked for free.” Groups such as Cinema Paradisso and M3DB helped in raising funds. The everyday expenses were put in the public domain.

The best director and best location-sound awards have vindicated the investors’ and artistes’ faith in the Oralpokkam team’s philosophy and talents.

The film has not yet been released through the theatres, but thousands of people have already seen it. “We used an innovative way for ‘film distribution,’” Sanal says. “We took our ‘Cinema Vandi’ (film wagon) to more than 100 locations to screen the film for the public.”

Not just the making and distribution, but the future of Oralpokkam also will be different. “We believe our film belongs to the society and hence, after five years, we will give up our copyright to the film and let the society at large use it anyway it likes.”

Sanal, 38, who is a lawyer by training, noted that winning the best director and best location-sound awards had made crowd-funding easier for Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani. “We have proved that crowdfunding can help promote good cinema,” Sanal said. “But, we are not just finding alternative ways of funding, we are also using alternative ways of story-telling, star-casting, distribution and non-conventional themes.”  

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