(From top) Director Pan Nalin; Christy Chung and Shawn Ku in Samsara; Neelesha BaVora in Samsara; Milind Soman and Mylene Jampanoi in Valley Of Flowers

The jury is being introduced at the 6th Marrakech International Film Festival. By the side of the chairman, the internationally renowned or notorious (depending on your point of view) Roman Polanski, stands the lone Indian member, someone called Pan Nalin. He is dressed in trademark black clothes with matching shoulder-length curly black hair. He is described as an “Indian director and screenwriter” but though he has made Samsara and now Valley of Flowers, two of the hottest properties in European cinema, actually very little is known about him in India.

Who exactly is Pan Nalin, the man who has taken sex to Himalayan heights? In between watching the 15 movies in competition, Pan Nalin relaxes by the swimming pool of the sprawling festival hotel, the Mansour Eddahbi, and reveals he is basically a simple Gujju boy from back home who has made it big in Paris, which has been his home since he left Mumbai in frustration 11 years ago. As to what brought him to the West, he smiled and offered a one-word answer: “Cinema.”

“I struggled for a long time in Bombay,” he said. “I did all kinds of odd jobs from spot boy to everything. I was almost an outsider in Indian popular cinema.” There is something engagingly modest and charming about Nalin as he recalled his youth running a film club when he was a student at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. “It used to be a huge struggle to get a print. We had no funds. I remember I would go to the railway station in Ahmedabad, put it on a bicycle, (wearing) sleeveless T-shirt lug the print and project the film myself, and that is how we were running a film club.”

Years later when he ended up in Paris, which the French with their characteristic arrogance consider the world capital of real cinema, Nalin, then 26, was like a little boy let loose in a chocolate factory. All he had to do was to buy a ticket to enter a magic world and see the directors he had dreamt of in his youth. “I just fell in love with Paris,” said Nalin, who was dying to see the works of Frederico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa and many others.

“I am from Gujarat and grew up in the countryside near Junagarh,” said Nalin. “I am a self-made filmmaker. I did not go to film school.” Self-made or not, he is today much in demand. Samsara, completed four years ago, has helped him leapfrog lesser mortals who would not give him the time of day when he was in India. Since he had done only ad films, the NFDC would not even consider his script when he trying to get his first feature off the ground in India. It took more generous Europeans to help him out.

The rights to Samsara, an ambitious Franco-Indian project shot at 15,000 ft in the Himalayas and described as “a spiritual love story set in the majestic landscape of Ladakh”, have been bought in the US and in the UK by Miramax. “We are going to release the DVD in India soon,” said Nalin. “We won some 30-plus awards. I did a 65-country release of which I personally went to 30 countries, everything from the whole of western Europe, Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Brazil, then Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan. We had a huge release in Thailand. Then, it was Canada. It has kept on growing.”

The boy who cycled to and from Ahmedabad station has certainly come a long way. After Samsara’s success, he was invited to be part of the jury at Marrakech, where the festival is relatively small but of an increasingly high quality. His new film, Valley of Flowers, a coproduction involving France, Germany and India, stars Naseeruddin Shah, Milind Soman and Mylene Jampanoi, a French-Chinese actress. His production company is called Wonderworks in Europe — “like (Steven Spielberg’s) Dreamworks” — and Monsoon Films in India.

Both Samsara and Valley of Flowers have quite a lot of sex up in the mountains, though, of course, Nalin explained his movies in rather more profound terms. This was his explanation of Samsara: “It is about the spiritual awakening of a Buddhist monk. He is in a monastery and questions his existence as to why he has to live like a monk from the age of five when Buddha himself lived a luxurious life before he became a monk. He relives Buddha’s life but upside down, so he starts with renunciation and, when he is at the age when Buddha renounced his kingdom, he renounces his monkhood and goes back into the world. He lives his life of love and lust and becomes a great farmer. In the end, he leaves that to go back to his monastery but there is a whole twist in the story which is his wife. I never imagined it would have such a huge impact.”

Again, Nalin is taken aback by how Valley of Flowers has been received by buyers. “I am surprised because we have pre-sold to nearly 40 countries, including Japan, Pakistan and the whole of western Europe.”

Nalin has enjoyed being on the Marrakech jury, where fellow members have included the French-Moroccan actor, Jamel Debbouze; the French actress Sandrine Bonnaire; the Portuguese actress Maria De Medeiros; the Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah; Ludivine, another French actress; Paz Vega, a Spanish actress; and David Wenham, an Australian comedian.

Nalin admitted he did not like having to sit in judgement on the work of others, but the experience had been refreshing. He had been able to discuss the artistic merits of movies rather than film financing.

“[These days] when two filmmakers meet, they say, ‘Where did you get the money? Can you give me that address?’ In a jury, you are talking about very interesting concepts, acting, cinematography, cinematic style — and that’s a very enriching experience.”

It’s Nalin’s good luck he has always managed to pick up patrons. In his early 20s in Mumbai he met Durga Khote, the actress who allowed him to use her company, Durga Khote Productions, to make commercials. He also teamed up with a partner, Shyam Patil, to make corporate movies. But his fortunes were to be transformed when he helped a French woman director, Yolande Zauberman, who had come to India in 1989 to make a docu-drama, Caste Criminelle (Born Criminal), on a tribe in Maharashtra from the Paradhi community. “It is a very little known side of Indian history,” Nalin pointed out. “The British put the community of Paradhis into confinement because they were doing a lot of petty crimes. From that, they became the ‘criminal caste’. They remained poor and illiterate.” Although the Maharashtra government has removed “criminal caste” from their prefix, “they live with the stigma even today”, commented Nalin.

After the documentary was shortlisted in 1990 at Cannes for an award in the ‘Perspective’ category that had been started by Truffaut, Nalin was able to leave India and begin a new life in Paris with the help of Zauberman. He had some money saved up because he had written the concept for a popular television series with the cartoonist R. K. Laxman called Wagle Ki Duniya. “I decided to abandon everything out of frustration,” he said.

In Paris, the work just flowed in. Commissioned by Western production companies, he returned repeatedly to India to make documentaries, including Khajuraho. “It was a simple black-and-white film and became a [calling] card for me. The BBC and Discovery Channel in the US got in touch, ‘Do you have other projects?’” He was thrilled: “I had no shortage of projects.”

While Indians in India usually think of working with the British or the Americans, Nalin has learnt fluent French and opened up a very fruitful partnership with France. It is worth emphasising that in France, where the French government has taken steps to ensure the home industry is not destroyed by the Americans, as has happened almost everywhere else in western Europe, 40 per cent of films released are made locally. It helps that the French have convinced themselves that they are ultimate arbiters of what is good cinema.

Nalin’s documentary, Ayurveda: Art of Being, has been running in Paris for 20 months. This kind of welcome would not be given to an Indian filmmaker anywhere else in the world. “If we reach January 12, 2007, we will break the record for the longest running documentary because it will be two years,” enthused Nalin.

With all the work piling up, Nalin now splits his time between Paris and India. At Marrakech, when Ajay Devgan and Kajol failed to turn up to the ‘homage’ which the festival authorities had prepared for them, it fell to Nalin, now a celebrity, to introduce Omkara’s director, Vishal Bhardwaj, scriptwriter Robin Bhatt, and producer Kumar Mangat, before a packed audience and say a few words in praise of the Bollywood where he himself had failed to find a niche so many years ago. It was one of life’s little ironies.