Tannistha Chatterjee with Florian Gallenberger

When a 27-year-old is asked about her maiden trip to one of the three biggest film festivals in the world that would screen her film, what dream does she start her story with? Accolades? Picture in the paper? Meeting big guns?

Tannistha Chatterjee went to Berlin hoping for a snowfall. ?When we landed at the airport, we were greeted by our director Florian Gallenberger. Since he is so respected there, having already won an Oscar, the local media was there. We were taken to our hotel in a limousine. I told Prashant (Narayanan, her costar in Shadows of Time) ?our fairy tale has begun?. And since it was so cold, I asked Florian if the weather report predicted snow during our stay. I had never seen snowfall, you know,? the bubbly girl explains.

The fairy tale could have unfurled the year before, as Tannistha?s earlier film Let the Wind Blow, an Indo-French production, had made it to Berlin in 2004. ?But I could not go then. Now, I regret the miss.? The Berlin Film Festival, Tannistha says, involves the whole city. ?The venue, Potsdamer Platz, has seven floors and it is tough to get passes.?

The screening of Shadows of Time was ?sold out?. ?A German film-maker working on a project in Calcutta with Indian actors ? the curiosity level was very high.? Tannistha was also impressed at how informed the audience and the media were about Indian cinema. ?They don?t see our work any more as just portrayals of poverty or repressed sexuality. Buddhadeb Dasgupta is very respected in the post-Satyajit Ray period.? Mainstream Hindi cinema is known to them and is liked for its form and technique. ?But Bollywood has no content to offer. How can they sit for three hours watching only form??

Berlin, she recalls, brought the crisis to the fore with the festival director ruing how difficult it was getting to bring good films without sponsor support. ?The moment there are sponsors, there is a demand to showcase Hollywood. He said he was happy to show 15 Hollywood films as that allowed him to give a platform to Abbas Kiarostami, Wong Kar Wai and Mohsen Makhmalbaff, who are not getting recognition at the Oscars. It is becoming tough to look at cinema as art for art?s sake.?

Tannistha herself, though, loves the song and dance that is integral to the mainstream form. Her first film Bas Yun Hi did not do well, but she is hopeful about her next release Divorce, with Jackie Shroff and Mandira Bedi. ?It is about a neglected child of high-flying parents who learns the term from a drunken lawyer staying in the neighbourhood and wants to divorce his parents.?

In Berlin, she saw Joseph Fiennes and Keanu Reeves (?every woman?s dreamboat?). And on the last day, it snowed.