Film industry must confront the structural crisis plaguing independent cinema in India, filmmaker Pratim Dasgupta said in a tete-a-tete with The Telegraph Online ahead of the premiere of his upcoming Hoichoi series Karma Korma.
“How can you ask a businessman not to do business? If Agra is playing opposite Mastiii 4, you know which one will get the money,” he said. Expecting exhibitors to voluntarily prioritise non-mainstream films is naïve, he added.
Instead, he believes the solution must be institutional. Citing PVR’s now-defunct “Directors Rare” showcase as a working model from a previous era, he called for a mandatory screening quota for independent titles.
“If this is a kind of corporate social responsibility, then make it binding,” he said. “Every month two independent films should get prime weekend shows. Only then will the system be fair.”
Dasgupta explained that outside cities like Kolkata, Mumbai and Bengaluru, footfall for smaller films is almost entirely limited to weekends. Without guaranteed access to prime-time slots, he said, indie projects simply “don’t stand a chance.”
Even his own Rannabati began with a limited release before building momentum — 16 houseful shows on its second Sunday compared to eight or nine the week before. “My films take time. I don’t have the instant opening of a Srijit Mukherji film. The work has to earn its own space,” he said.
He also expressed concern that the core audience showing up for Bengali cinema today is largely 40-plus, while younger viewers turn out only for “event” releases.
Dasgupta’s new series Karma Korma arrived on Hoichoi this Friday. He says the back-to-back arrival of two projects with cooking at the core is “pure coincidence”.
“Rannabati was shot in February; Karma Korma happened much later. And the last actual food film I made was Machher Jhol in 2017,” he said.
That said, he remains convinced food is “criminally underused” in Indian cinema. “We are constantly thinking about food — at breakfast we plan lunch, at lunch we plan dinner — but you don’t see food used meaningfully in films,” he said, adding that audience feedback to Rannabati reinforced his belief in food as memory, therapy and emotional currency.
Dasgupta was drawn to a version of Ritabhari Chakraborty rarely seen on screen. “If you scroll through her Instagram, you’ll see some similarities between her and Shahana. If you talk to her, there’s an air of decadence, arrogance, pride. But she is not like that as a person,” he said. “I wanted to give her something against the texture of her usual presence.”