Both Love Sex aur Dhokha (top) and A Wednesday were low-budget movies that did well at the box office

Big Bollywood’s bleak times have turned the arclights on whether it is time for the small film to shine bright.

As new Indian filmmaker voices are applauded from Cannes to Sundance and the occasional small film hits box office jackpot back home, The Telegraph explores the dynamics of the small “big” films in B-town.

Of the only seven movies which have made money in the first six months of 2010, two are what we can call small wonders, making it a much better success ratio for the under-Rs 6 crore no-star films.

One is Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya, starring Naseerudin Shah and Arshad Warsi as goons-on-the-run chacha-bhatija, both of whom fall for the same femme fatale, played by Vidya Balan. The other is Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha (LSD), which featured only newcomers and was made on a budget of less than Rs 2 crore, making it an amazing success story just after the first weekend.

“The general impression is that a director is forced to make a small movie because he cannot afford stars, but making an experimental film without stars can be a conscious creative decision,” says Dibakar. He indicates that as the maker of the successful Khosla Ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, he could have made a star-studded film but chose to push the movie-making envelope with LSD.

Using the digital camera first as a spectator, then as a voyeur, and finally as an evidence in three short stories, Dibakar’s fresh storytelling style has raised the hopes and aspirations of an entire generation of handycam-toting film students, besides proving to be a winning business model.

Experiment has been the key word for many a successful small filmmaker. Some, like Anurag Kashyap, have chosen to go wild within the Bollywood format, while others like Neeraj Pandey have tried a completely new narrative device.

Using two character actors chatting over the phone to tell the story about a personal fight against terrorism, Pandey not only struck gold at the box office with A Wednesday, the Naseer-Anupam Kher-starrer has also been remade by Kamal Haasan in the south, proving that a big idea can go a long distance.

“As is the case with most small films and especially first films, the idea was to make the movie and not worry about how it will do at the box office,” says Neeraj. “So I just wrote the script and approached the two actors. They liked what they read and we were on. It was only later that UTV came on board, gave it a good release and it became a hit.”

A Wednesday and LSD are just recent examples of a series of small wonders. Others include My Brother… Nikhil and Iqbal in 2005, Khosla Ka Ghosla and Gangster in 2006, Bheja Fry and Life in a… Metro in 2007, Aamir and Welcome to Sajjanpur in 2008 and Dev D in 2009.

The small films continue to be the unsung heroes of an industry going through a financial nightmare. The big movies have lost so many hundred crores that the tiny profits of the LSDs and Ishqiyas don’t really interest the Bolly bosses. “The small films were always an image-building exercise… big studios never made them for money and now that money is the only bone of contention, small films are no longer on the corporate radar,” explains a trade analyst.

Take the Udaan example. The film was written by director Vikramaditya Motwane in 2003 and till last year, he couldn’t find a producer. High on the success of his own Dev D, Anurag Kashyap decided to back the film but still no studio came along to show support. Only after the film, featuring a new boy and TV actor Ronit Roy in the cast, was selected in competition at Cannes did UTV agree to present the film.

“Yes, it’s been a difficult journey,” says Motwane. “But there are so many stories in our country where you can’t possibly have stars. How do you tell them”?

Motwane got lucky with Udaan but others have reasons to complain. Despite the past success of such directors, films like Sagar Ballary’s Kachcha Limboo, Rajat Kapoor’s Fatso, Sudhir Mishra’s Tera Kya Hoga Johnny and Rituparno Ghosh’s Sunglass have shown no signs of reaching theatres. More than the makers, it’s usually the lack of stars that has been the hurdle.

It is left to people like Anurag who has been using his newfound power position to call the shots. For his next film Gangs of Wasseypur, the man has cast Manoj Bajpai and a bunch of newcomers. “Meri chadar jitni chauri hai, main us mein kar raha hoon (what he means is that he will cut his coat according to his cloth),” he says. “When I plan an expensive film, I need a star. India, sadly, has not yet become a country where you can go for fresh faces when the idea is strong enough. Still I am pushing as much as I can.”

Companies are not helping the cause much. You cannot just storm their offices with a good script; you have to have stars attached to your project. Says Bheja Fry producer Sunil Doshi: “The big studios are only interested in proposals, they are not looking at how many drafts of the script you have written.”

To counter such obstacles, innovative methods of funding are being ideated. For his new film I Am, Onir — who made My Brother…Nikhil maker has got a substantial chunk of the production budget through social networking sites from 60-odd “co-producers” (those who funded Rs 1 lakh or more) and 300-plus “co-owners” (those who donated Rs 1,000 or more).

Says Onir: “From my experiences in the industry, I learnt very quickly that the big studios and producers were simply not interested in projects that do not have big stars and big budgets. So you cannot possibly cast stars in a film about child abuse or gay romance. I was tired of hearing “nos”. That I Am is a crowd-sourced film is not by choice but by compulsion.”

But the stars can figure in a different capacity. Like Aamir Khan has produced Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live, a film about farmer suicides that was selected in competition at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival and features new and little-known actors. Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment is also producing Roshan Abbas’s Always Kabhi Kabhi, a high school film featuring four debutants.

Directors agree that the star association is certainly welcome but has to be more consistent and spread wider across the industry. “The voice of the Indian filmmaker would only come out through these small issue-based films and not by the multi-crore assembly-line Hollywood clones being produced every Friday,” says a young maker. In Mira Nair’s words — “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will.”