If film-maker Mahesh Bhatt's visit to Jharkhand and his tweets about it are any indication, the state's new film policy formulated in December 2015, with incentives to shoot here, has hit the mark.
Bhatt, whose Srijit Mukherji-directed film Begum Jaan boasting an A-list cast of Naseeruddin Shah and Vidya Balan is being shot in Jharkhand's Dumka, appeared extremely happy with chief minister Raghubar Das, whom he met right after his arrival on Thursday.
Despite supporting the Congress in the 2014 general elections, Bhatt lavished praise on BJP-ruled Jharkhand and its chief minister. He called the people of the state, which "opened its doors to the film industry", "awesome" and the chief minister "a man of action" in three back-to-back tweets.
On Friday, at an event at Chamber Bhavan in Ranchi where he was being felicitated by traders, Bhatt said: "Not the policy alone, it is the proactive attitude of the government that acts as a catalyst."
"Correspondence with the bureaucracy would otherwise take a long time but they (the Das government) sent a representative to me and that resulted in finalising the Dumka location," Bhatt said, adding they had earlier scouted locations in Rajasthan and almost zeroed in on a Maharashtra site for the film.
On what swung the deal in Jharkhand's favour, Bhatt said: "Government support is very important when you have a long shooting schedule lasting nearly 50 days."
Landlocked yet undeniably photogenic Jharkhand, with its rugged hills, dense forests and cascading waterfalls had been captured on film by iconic film-makers Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak decades ago, when it was part of Bihar. But, Naxalite violence ironically in some of the most scenic locales and lack of a concerted effort on the part of the state government to woo film-makers pushed Jharkhand off the movie-location map.
Though Vikramaditya Motwane's Udaan, shot extensively in Jamshedpur, nudged the door open, it is arguably the 2015 film policy as well as the hype around the shooting of Ranchi boy M.S. Dhoni's biopic (M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, slated for a September release) that got Bollywood talking about Jharkhand.
Anupam Kher, who plays Dhoni's father in the biopic, is shooting two of his films, Kaanu and Gunday aur Gudiya in Jharkhand. But, Bhatt's production Begum Jaan, a remake of Srijit Mukherji's Bengali partition saga and how it affects a brothel near the border, is the most prestigious project Jharkhand has bagged in recent years.
Mukherji is directing the Hindi version with a different star cast. In the acclaimed Bengali film, Rituparna Sengupta had played Balan's role.
Appreciating the state's film policy that gives grants, subsidies and tax concessions to films shot here, Bhatt said it would generate business and employment. Describing the film policy as "a bold step", he repeated his yesterday's tweet: "The distance between dream and reality is called action. The CM of Jharkhand, Mr Raghubar Das, is a man of action."
"If everything goes smoothly, the crew and cast members of one film will act as state ambassadors and spread the message across film hubs in Calcutta, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai (that Jharkhand is a good place to shoot)," he said.
