11th Mumbai International Film Festival Diaries: Day 3
The Tata Theatre, where the Competition films in MIFF-2010 are being screened has a red carpet outside it, hedged by an angered barrier. For VIPs, you are informed. Ordinary mortals have to walk on regular flooring around the carpet.
|
|
Riding Solo To The Top Of The World |
u00a0The Festival is properly underway -- the schedule and brochure are handed to delegates in a nifty paper bag, documentary DVDs are for sale in the foyer and coffee is free -- sponsored by an enterprising coffee brand that has seen a promotional opportunity. This is the kind of freely given corporate support that the docu movement needs.
TV channels are just about starting to support documentaries, a bit of corporate funding and revenue models are needed. People are willing to pay to see good documentaries. Ways have to be found to take the movement to the masses in new and imaginative ways.
However, going by the numbers at MIFF, the documentary and short film movement is in no danger of dying out yet. Exhibition opportunities have come from unexpected sources --u00a0 through the efforts of independent promoters like Cyrus Dastur of Shamiana, and Vikalp docus and short films are screened at restaurants and cafes in the city, and yes, people are paying to see them.
If the film is one like Gaurav Jani's One Crazy Ride, of course audiences will clamour to it. A couple of years ago Jani had made an extraordinary film called Riding Solo To The Top Of The World, which is exactly what it was -- a man alone, his motor bike, his camera, plenty of energy, courage and determination. He follows it up with One Crazy Ride in which he and his fellow bikers Nicolitta Pereira, Vinod Panicker, Sanjeev Sharma, Gursaurabh Singh Toor traverse Arunachal Pradesh, via an untried route. Leaves the viewer breathless with admiration and envy.
Award-winner Anwar Jamal's new film, Anwar -- Dream of Dark Night is a heart-warming film about a Delhi slum dweller who aspires to build a movie hall in his village in the Indo-Bangladesh border.
Amazingly, he succeeds after years of slogging, and invites the filmmaker to screen his documentary there, offering him 50 per cent of the proceeds.
A documentary filmmaker had a valid grouse: When we don't like being seen as a lesser entity to Bollywood, we do we invite Yash Chopra and not a documentary filmmaker to inaugurate MIFF. The ever-gracious Chopra, however, suggested that MIFF be turned into an annual event instead of a biennial one.
-- Deepa Gahlot
(Watch this space for updates)
