By Hindustan Times
If there’s something that the primary quarter of 2012 has shown the Indian film industry, it’s this: never underestimate the ability of an excellent story. Kahaani, a film by Sujoy Ghosh centred on a pregnant woman played by Vidya Balan, made on a modest budget of Rs 15 crore, made Rs 67 crore in three weeks. Paan Singh Tomar (PST), a biopic by Tigmanshu Dhulia a couple of national-level sportsman turned dacoit played by Irrfan, was made on the cheap of Rs 7 crore, had a limited release, but made Rs 15 crore in two weeks on word of mouth alone.
Before these movies released, no person gave them a possibility. Within the 80s and 90s, we’d have called them ‘alternative cinema’. There has been nothing mainstream in regards to the stories. Yet, weeks later, we’re still talking about them in tones of awe.
Kahaani and PST show us that offbeat, niche movies have finally emerged from their dark corners and settled into our collective consciousness as a type of cinematic art we will be able to regularly look forward to finding on the multiplexes, within the same way that we think to look big Bollywood blockbusters.
This have been build up over the past six years or so, since director Dibaker Banerjee woke us up in 2006 with Khosla Ka Ghosla. Then, we watched films like Bheja Fry (2007), Aamir and A Wednesday (2008), Dev D (2009), but these were one-off, small, subversive explosions in mainstream Bollywood. In 2010, we had no choice but to pay serious attention to the little movie. One after the other, we watched astounded, films like Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan, Abhishek Sharma’s Tere Bin Laden and Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live, that made stories the star. In between, we caught Shyam Benegal’s Well Done Abba, Dibakar Banerjee’s LSD and Subhash Kapoor’s Phas Gaye Re Obama, and wondered: what’s happening in Bollywood? Is the opposite becoming the mainstream? And if it is, how did this happen?
Changing the tide
Think about films that star stories in place of heroes, and also you probably have two words for your head: Anurag Kashyap. Almost every contemporary filmmaker brings up Kashyap’s name in any conversation concerning the new Hindi cinema. Kashyap’s determination to make good, relevant, contemporary films and his support for anyone with the similar aspiration is one big for the reason that there’s this kind of buzz about offbeat films now, they are saying. “The credit for reinventing cinema goes to Kashyap,” says independent producer Sunil Bohra. “He had the balls to make Dev.D. People now visit see his films, they don’t care who the actor is. Over time he has developed that relationship with the audience and now he's extremely influential.”
This ‘community’ isn't a gang of friends pushing each other’s work. It's simply a host of individuals in various spheres of filmmaking, who, once they genuinely like someone’s work, will do all they may be able to to support it. “They’re not under one banner, and yet they’re there for every other,” says Vikas Bahl, director of the National Award winning Chillar Party, former head of UTV Spotboy (the division of the entertainment corporate that specializes in small films with big stories), and now partner with Anurag Kashyap and two other filmmakers in Phantom Films. “It’s instinctive. Vishal (Bhardwaj) loved Amole’s (Gupte) film (Stanley Ka Dabba), so he helped him. Salman Khan doesn’t come from alternative cinema, but he did the similar for Chillar Party. It came from his heart. You genuinely like a movie, you do it.”
Old bonhomie
Though this sounds mindblowingly fresh — good heavens! filmmakers who must be rivals actually exhorting the general public to observe each other’s films or marching right into a possible funder’s office and insisting that he check out a brand new boy’s work — this isn’t new within the industry, says Gupte. “Back in good old days, you had Kundan Shah, Sudhir Mishra, Vinod Chopra, Ketan Mehta and Saeed Mirza who supported each other, spoke the language of cinema, and stood up for what they liked,” he says. “That was not the time of complex publicity campaigns. Those were innocent times.”
And the folks who're supporting one another don't seem to be all from the ‘alternative’ side. “Ram Gopal Varma, Vinod Chopra and so forth went in the course of the grind,” points out Kashyap. “So while you see Karan Johar giving an opportunity to half a dozen new directors under his banner, or Yash Raj Films and Balaji Films doing the same, and banners like UTV and Viacom 18 jumping into the fray, it’s a fair sign.”
But just the truth that a narrative is ‘different’ doesn’t make producers and banners whip out their cheque books. That's why likeminded filmmakers have to be like a community. “My fight was to not outdo the opposite cinema,” says Kashyap. “The fight was to co-exist. We don’t need to adapt to what works, we wish to keep changing and bringing new things to the audience. When PST and Kahaani work, the ambience changes, and the selection of films which have been termed alternate cinema are increasing annually. That could be a good sign.”
