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"It was a pure coincidence," he told this correspondent ahead of the screening of his latest film, Ugly, in the Directors Fortnight on the third day of the festival. "The films came to the Cannes selectors from different sources. Monsoon Shootout was sent by Fortissimo Films, The Lunchbox was entered by Match Factory and Bombay Talkies arrived from Viacom Studio 18. I just happened to be involved in all of these films." It was for the first
time in nearly two decades that India had two films in the premier
festival’s official selection — Amit Kumar’s Monsoon Shootout
and the compendium film Bombay Talkies, directed by Karan Johar,
Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap to mark the centenary
of Hindi cinema.
The last time India had a brace of films in the official Cannes line-up was way back in 1994 when Shaji N. Karun’s Malayalam film, Swaham, was in competition and Sandip Ray’s Bengali-language Uttoron made it to Un Certain Regard. India’s better-than-usual presence in Cannes this year was obviously because the festival was celebrating 100 years of our film industry. But the question that has to be asked is: did all this translate into any major buzz for the new voices of Mumbai films? What genuine lovers of Indian cinema missed in Cannes this year was the industry’s sheer diversity which, at home, is drowned out by the din that Bollywood generates. Somehow, cinema of the subcontinent, for the Cannes Film Festival, has shrunk to represent the output of just a small part of Mumbai. This development might be good for Anurag Kashyap as a filmmaker in the short term but it can only have a deleterious effect on Indian cinema as a whole in the long run. Cannes did have one Indian film in 2012 that filled one with hope — Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely, which screened in Un Certain Regard. Although set in Mumbai, it was a genuinely independent film, both in spirit and substance.
The Mumbai-based director hopes to film his next project, Chenu, about a boy who is caught between Maoist rebels and upper caste gangs in Bihar, pretty much in the manner that he shot Mumbai Cha Raja, without professional actors and on real locations. Singh was in Cannes because Chenu was one of 15 projects from around the world that was selected for Cinefondation’s l’Atelier, a segment in Cannes where independent filmmakers are given a platform from where they can reach to potential funders. Ashok Amritraj, independent American producer of Indian origin, was happy that India was being feted on the Croisette but he would have wanted to see a bigger splash being made by the country. "India should
have pretty much taken over and done an event a day for at least four
to five days in a row. I am not seeing enough," he told this
writer.
But that is the way the cookie crumbles on the world stage for India. Its cinema is definitely growing and some of its younger filmmakers who are working with the mainstream idiom but in a more meaningful way than the more lowbrow breed of directors are indeed making some headway. But as usual, the focus has been on individuals rather than the industry in its totality. Amitabh Bachchan has a bit role in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, this year’s Cannes Film Festival opener. Moreover, Bollywood actress Vidya Balan was on the nine-member main competition jury headed by Steven Spielberg and including the likes of Ang Lee, Cristian Mungiu, Lynne Ramsay and Naomi Kawase, besides three top flight actors, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Auteuil and Christoph Waltz. So, India was in the news all right but its cinema played second fiddle to films from other Asian nations, let alone the rest of the world. In the competition alone, Japan had two films — Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father Like Son and Takashi Miike’s Shield of Straw — while both Iran and China were represented by strong contenders — Asghar Farhadi’s Le Passe (The Past) and Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin respectively. And when you saw a few of the above-mentioned films, you realised that the kind of so-called independent Indian cinema that is currently being pushed globally might not be quite as path-breaking as the media hype around them might lead to believe. Be that as it may, the 66th edition of the Cannes Film Festival allowed India a foot in the door. Whether it can be pushed open a little more in the years ahead will depend on how much of the range of Indian cinematic traditions can break through into the big festivals.
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T
As filmmaker Manjeet
Singh, whose debut effort, Mumbai Cha Raja, is awaiting release
in the domestic market after travelling to festivals around the world,
rues, there is no space left for his kind of independent cinema, films
that aren’t backed by established studios and are often made on the
fly.
