Independent films remain absent in India
INDIA’S independent films are winning top awards at international festivals and appearing in theatres across the US and Europe – just not in India itself.
The films – made by Indians and about India – are unlikely to have a major release in their own country because reluctant distributors fear they don’t have audience appeal or contain controversial ideas.
At the Cannes Film Festival in May, All We Imagine As Light, a film about the friendship between three female nurses from small towns making their way in the Mumbai megalopolis, won a top award – a first for any film made by an Indian.
But its director, Payal Kapadia, says that while the movie will definitely be released in her home state of Kerala, her producers are trying to figure out how to get it released nationwide.
Shubhra Gupta, one of India’s foremost film critics, said: “Do I see her film getting the kind of play it deserves here? Absolutely not. That this kind of film-making will reach someone in New York much faster than my Delhi neighbourhood, is something that everyone knows. It’s a given.”
Film-makers and fans of independent cinema are united in their frustration over the deteriorating state of distribution.
India may be known for the glitz and splash of Bollywood, but alternate cinema in the country has a long and decorated history going back decades. The films, known locally as “parallel” films, focus on themes of social injustice.
Distribution has always been an uphill battle for the independent movies, but the introduction of multiplexes in the 2000s and online streaming services in the 2010s created a new space for them.
The country’s largest theatre chain, PVR, started showing independent movies under a new brand called Director’s Rare. This was reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s when state-run television broadcast the alternate cinema produced by the government-run National Film Development Corporation.
The 21st-century multiplex push felt like “a kind of renaissance”, said Gupta.
It was in this environment that Vinay Shukla’s 2016 documentary, An Insignificant Man, which won awards in Warsaw and Brooklyn, spent eight weeks in Indian theatres. India’s certification board did try to censor it but the director was able to appeal the decision.
That renaissance came to an end when the pandemic emptied cinemas and squeezed distribution companies. At the same time, there was political backlash from government-aligned Hindu nationalists who disapproved of many of the themes in the independent movies.
The Director’s Rare brand vanished and PVR rarely touches the independent films.
Shukla’s latest film, While We Watched, about an anti-establishment Indian journalist, was shown in New York. The film racked up awards in Toronto and Busan, South Korea, and won a Peabody, a distinguished award for electronic media.
The documentary, All That Breathes, about a Muslim family of bird rescuers in New Delhi, also won a Peabody this year, as well as an Oscar nomination, and was shown in theatres in the US, Britain, the Netherlands and France.
Last year, the short documentary, The Elephant Whisperers, a film about an Indian couple who take care of elephants, won the Oscar for best short documentary.
In the past, film-makers like Shukla could expect to use the international festival circuit as a springboard to domestic distribution.
But the approach no longer worked, said Kanu Behl, the director of Agra, which was released in French theatres after premiering at Cannes but remains absent in India.
“I am an Indian, I work in my language and I want my people to watch my film,” he said. “I don’t want to go to Cannes. I have to go to Cannes because I don’t have stars in my film. I have to make my film the star. But even that model is not working.”
That model of success abroad translating into domestic distribution was a “fool’s paradise” because audiences weren’t interested, countered Shariq Patel, the former chief executive of Zee Studios, a film production and distribution company.
Three of his films were screened at dozens of festivals, but only Joram made it to the Indian box office and had no audience, he said.
PVR used to be able to take risks on Indian indies, said executive director Sanjeev Kumar Bijli. But, PVR had been in survival mode in the wake of the pandemic, he said, focusing on hits to bring the “masses” into theatres again.
“The Indian consumer doesn’t want to see the ills of society. We see this every day. For us, cinema is a form of escape,” he said.
Film-makers vehemently disagree, pointing to the overwhelmingly favourable reception their movies receive when Indian audiences manage to see them at local festivals or in pirated versions.
While We Watched was viewed countless times in India through links on Youtube, Google Drive and Telegram even before it became available on the Mubi streaming service for art house films.
The idea of only offering spectacle resembles a “circus”, said Shaunak Sen, the director of All That Breathes. The documentary can be seen in India only because it was picked up by HBO, which has an agreement with the local Jio Cinema streaming service.
Joram was one of the top 10 films in India for a week after it began streaming on Prime Video in April.
Distributors unfairly “blame audiences” instead of collaborating with film-makers to find ways to monetise the audience, said Devashish Makhija, the film’s director.
Streaming at first had seemed like the solution. Netflix and other companies entered India, promising alternatives to mainstream movies, offering up groundbreaking content such as Sacred Games and Made in Heaven.
“Everybody sat up and took notice,” recalled Gupta.
But then, the backlash started. Hindu nationalists accused the streamers of broadcasting content that hurt religious sentiments in India. In response, Netflix and others switched gears to present safer fare, including true crime serials and romcoms. They also opted for content that had been screened in theatres and had been approved by the certification board.
Streamers have carried some of these films, but only abroad and not in India, like Rintu Thomas’s film, Writing With Fire, about low-caste women journalists. At Sundance, the film won the audience award, and the award for world cinema documentary, and was nominated at the Oscars for best feature documentary two years ago.
Directors say that when they take matters into their own hands, they connected with the audience.
Fahad Mustafa and his team raised their own marketing and distribution budget, some of which went to small Indian town screenings of their award-winning film about electricity theft, or Katiyabaaz.
“When the film goes to the people it is really meant for, you see the impact that it can create,” he said.
“The current distribution scenario is really about a lack of imagination. Somewhere, we collectively became very cynical about what we want cinema to do for us, essentially limiting ourselves and our stories.”