NFDC’s Film Bazaar becomes indie cinema’s go-to place for funds - The Economic Times
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NFDC’s Film Bazaar becomes indie cinema’s go-to place for funds Post a Comment
By Charmy Harikrishnan, ET Bureau | Updated: Nov 27, 2016, 11.06 AM IST
Chance encounters are the stuff cinema is made of. In 2012, a talented 25-year-old was wandering around the National Film Development Corporation's Film Bazaar on the shores of Goa. All he had was a gritty, pared-to-the-bones script about an old Dalit singer who is tried in a lower court of Maharashtra. He had pitched his project at the Film Bazaar's Co-Production Market but he couldn't find a co-producer — not one. He did something else, though — he struck up a conversation with Paolo Bertolin, an ebullient, eagle-eyed programmer for the Venice Film Festival. In his tangerine shorts and beige kurta, Bertolin now recalls that meeting with the young man with the script exactly four years ago, almost at the very spot: "We clicked. We discussed the films we liked, the films of that year." Which films? "I can't recall exactly, but possibly Michael Haneke (whose film Amour had just won the Palme d'Or at Cannes). We decided to keep in touch." Also Read: Filmmakers trying to make sense of the Arab spring on its sixth anniversary About 18 months later, the young man was ready with the rough cut of his film. "Show me,"
The Bazaar is also generating interest among indie filmmakers across South Asia.
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exclaimed Bertolin. "The first time I watched the film I was tired but its tempo was strange. So I went back to it when I was fully rested and receptive. It was an extraordinarily mature film," he recalls. "The quality of acting and direction, the complexity of the film, the way it commented on politics, gender and caste, the way its register shifted: it was an incredible job for a newcomer." The young man was Chaitanya Tamhane and the film was Court, which went on to win the Best Film at the Orizzonti (Horizons) section of the Venice Film Festival and got Tamhane the Luigi De Laurentiis (Lion of the Future) Award for the best debut film.
In 2014, it was the turn of another 25-year-old called Raam Reddy. He sat across Tamhane, flush from his Venice win, at one of the Costa Coffee outlets in Mumbai. Tamhane told Reddy about this indie hub called the Film Bazaar that unfolds in Goa every year. The deadline for submissions had just got over but Reddy rushed the rough cut of his film Thithi to the NFDC. His unusual film — rooted in rural Karnataka, philosophical and earthy and whimsical at the same time — became part of the Work in Progress section where filmmakers get feedback and suggestions from a handful of international experts.
The rough cut was very long — 2 hours, 40 minutes — but American producer Sunmin Park, one of Reddy's mentors, realised that "it was an important film that others needed to see". On the sidelines of this year's Bazaar, she recalled that encounter: "Thithi was in Kannada and about a place that I had never been to, but it was the film that I responded to the most that year." Drawn by its authenticity, she came on board as a co-producer. Thithi premiered at the 2015 Locarno festival, where it won the Golden Leopard and the First Feature Award in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente (Filmmakers of the Present) section. "I owe my career to the Film Bazaar," says Reddy, whose next project, a magical realist film, a departure from Thithi, will also be co-produced by Park. "We are committed to all his future projects," says Park of Maxmedia.
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