There is a trend that Ritam Bhatnagar started noticing in 2015 that made him rethink his approach to India Film Project, a festival that he founded in 2010, which returns to the city this weekend for its ninth edition. Bhatnagar saw that people who were earlier happy to carry tags like "filmmaker", "photographer" or "editor" were no longer willing to be typecast in the same mould. Instead, they started calling themselves "creators", or "storytellers". The reason, he says, is that the Internet expanding offered them a chance to diversify their portfolios. "So, someone whose day job is that of a photographer was now getting requests to create wedding videos. Or, for example, if someone’s a writer, they realised that they could shoot a video of them reciting a poem and put it up online. That’s why they preferred the term ‘storyteller’, which wasn’t in vogue at all before," Bhatnagar says, adding that this trend made him shift his festival’s focus away from just films to overall content creation.

The audience in rapt attention