Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

Looking beyond blockbusters

CHENNAI: Songs, dances, fights and love make up the traditional success formula of an Indian film. Add a star cast, and a blockbuster is on its way. With oodles of money and plenty of hype, such movies garner a huge audience.

Smaller films, the ‘independent’ kind though, have problems. Low budget with no big names attached, these films are not well distributed or promoted and so, despite being good, fail at the box office. What can be done to ensure a creative space for such films and ensure they are given good distribution too?

This was the subject of discussion at the U.S. Consulate here on Tuesday, with film critics, producers and artists taking part. Led by K. Hariharan, Director, L.V. Prasad Film and TV Academy, the discussion spanned American films, studio culture, geo-specificity of recent films, soaring costs of production, remakes and multiplexes.

Multiplexes, some of the group felt, were a boon to independent films. ‘Bheja Fry,’ a film that would otherwise have hardly had an audience was quite a success. Multiplexes catered to various tastes enabling even niche movies to become successes.

Distribution though was still a problem. Mr. Hariharan felt that unless somebody was willing to take a risk to promote and distribute an independent film, good cinema would lag far behind masala mixes. Another problem, he said, was the dearth of good Tamil and Hindi literature in recent times. He said the lack of good scriptwriters was also an obstacle facing independent cinema.

Corporatisation of the film industry, dichotomy of the actor–star and comparisons of various film industries were also discussed.

The consensus: What independent cinema needed was creative space to make a good film without interference or compromise and a distribution system on a par with that of blockbuster films.

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