Manoj Bajpayee in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur; Miss Lovely by Ashim Ahluwalia

Recently,NDTV broadcast a programme which celebrated the renaissance in current Bengali films which featured Ichche, Bedroom, Nobel Chor, Hemlock Society and of course Bhooter Bhobishyot as the main newspeg. It was heart-warming to get such national attention for our industry. Almost around the same time, the Cannes film festival selections for 2012 were announced.

After many years, three Indian films have been chosen for the festival. They are Miss Lovely by Ashim Ahluwalia, Peddlers by Vasan Bala and Gangs of Wasseypur 1 and 2 by Anurag Kashyap. It was great to see the jubilation in the Bombay film fraternity after the selections were announced.

Being a part of the Bengali film fraternity, I pondered on this fact. Not since the 1980s has Bengali cinema been able to crack the competition section of the most high-profile film festival in the world. Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire and Mrinal Sen’s Kharij and Genesis were part of the competition section in the 1980s. In the past two decades, Bengal has hardly made a dent at the top festivals. While we rightly celebrate the resurgence of Bengali cinema, this is an aspect where we have severely lagged, and increasingly so over the years.

Now the question is whether this is important at all. I would like to argue that it is indeed. There are two aspects involved here. One is the economic aspect and the other artistic. It is true that there is incongruence for world cinema in the domestic audience. Thus, for domestic filmmakers it is a huge risk to cater to the world cinema market at the cost of the domestic market. But nowadays a lot of the festival films are very audience-friendly too.

Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur is a mainstream film with 25 songs. Closer home, Kaushik Ganguly’s Aarekti Premer Galpo had a successful commercial run domestically while it represented India at the Berlin Film Festival. The point is whether the films have a universal tone. India’s most successful world filmmaker till date, Satyajit Ray, made films which were very rooted in the local but could capture the universal aesthetic.

If we can crack the top film festivals then the next important step is the monetisation of these films. Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely has already been picked up for world distribution by the internationally renowned distributor Fortissimo Films, who distribute films by Wong Kar-wai and other top directors.

At the recently-concluded FICCI Frames in Mumbai, there was an entire session on globally monetising Indian films. Herein lies a crucial role of an active producer. There is a system of producer representatives and sales agents in major film markets which represent such films with that goal. But first we should have products worthy of that. We can’t blame it on our cash-strapped industry since the latest Oscar-winning Iranian film, A Separation, was an extremely low-budget film. It was just fascinating storytelling and acting. The same is true for the films from Thailand, South Korea and Romania which have created waves in world cinema.

The artistic reason for competing with world cinema is that it gives our cinema an identity. It is a travesty that internationally, people still identify the Bengali film industry and culture with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. On the other hand, the Bombay independent circuit has been slowly acquiring a unique voice over the years.

I would attribute this to two main figures who have sincerely backed such a movement — Aamir Khan and Anurag Kashyap. With Peepli Live and Dhobi Ghat, Aamir Khan has successfully made a foray with his productions into the world cinema landscape. He had personally campaigned for his film at Sundance and had a successful European release of Peepli Live. He had the vision to realise the importance of such films alongside blockbusters like 3 Idiots and Ghajini. Similarly, Anurag Kashyap had produced Udaan which went to Cannes a couple of years ago and now it’s the turn of his own film and that of his assistant Vasan Bala.

There is a wonderful website called www.dearcinema.com which propagates this movement.

Sadly, Tollywood has had no such visionary. A film by a Sri Lankan director made with a Bengali cast and shot in Bengal made it to Cannes but here all the noise around Chhatrak was about a particular YouTube video by the film’s leading lady Paoli Dam. I dare not go into that controversy anymore, but it would have been nice to see an equal enthusiasm to watch the film — maybe sans that scene — since Vimukthi Jayasundara, the director, is an important voice in the world film scenario.

A German student group made a film called Raju with a Calcutta cast and shot it in Calcutta to take it to the Oscars. More recently, Sujoy Ghosh, a Bollywood filmmaker, made Kahaani in Calcutta that shook the country. But none of these were indigenous Tollywood films.

So do we lack a world or even national perspective? This is a question we need to ask ourselves.

Let me end on a positive note. Recently Srijit (Mukherji) told me about a film called Bakita Byaktigoto made by a first-time director called Pradipta Bhattacharya, which was phenomenal. But it was still in the cans. He, along with a group of friends, has started a company called Tripod which will try to push such independent films. I know that Dream Digital, a company owned by sound designers Jojo Chaki and Anirban Sengupta, actively co-produces such promising independent films.

And after Bhooter Bhobishyot, we know that we can ignore new voices at our own peril, voices which might push the boundaries of the Bengali film industry.