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New Indian Express
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
I helped save MAMI in 2014. Its 2025 death fills me with rage.
Picture a tiny, five-foot-something woman from Assam, battling gravity and loneliness in Mumbai, trudging religiously to the Mumbai Film Festival (affectionately called MAMI) every single year. Her dream? To become a filmmaker. With no other path visible, she endures endless queues and back-breaking theatre seats, absorbing the craft of masters whose visions flickered to life exactly as intended: on a big, forty-foot screen. Years later, her own film premieres on that screen. I was there, capturing her tears as they fell. That woman was Rima Das. That film, born in a remote corner of Northeast India that few outsiders had been to, was Village Rockstars, and it travelled the world. That is the power of MAMI – Mumbai's only global-scale film festival. I tell Rima's story because I witnessed it first-hand, having helped her become the filmmaker she deserved to be. But her story isn't unique. It echoes Nagraj Manjule's story. His debut, the brilliant Fandry, received its first public screening at MAMI. I saw the mist in his eyes too after a thunderous five-minute standing ovation – cut short only by the cruel clock. Even he confessed that MAMI wasn't just a festival for him: it was his film school. Chaitanya Tamhane (Court, The Disciple) and Anand Gandhi (Ship Of Theseus) walked similar dreams born on MAMI screens. Countless others, perhaps less heralded but no less devoted, kept returning. For them, MAMI was Varanasi, Jerusalem, Mecca, Kaaba – a shifting pilgrimage defined by whichever theatre hosted the magic that year. That's why, in 2014, when Shyam Benegal (then festival Chairman and whose office I was working in) and Director Srinivasan Narayanan told me the festival was shutting down – its sponsor vanished, funds zero – I snapped. I unleashed an angry rant on My editor, Sarita Ravindranath, wisely titled it: 'Mumbai's Rs Five Crore Shame: Who will fund a film festival' (The article is now lost behind a server with only a ghost in its original link). The rest, as the cliché screams, is history. Manish Mundra was the first to step in, with what became, along with Anand Mahindra, the most generous cheques of that year. Then came Aamir Khan, Rajkumar Hirani and Vidhu Vinod Chopra. A lot of other filmmakers: I remember Hansal Mehta and Anurag Kashyap, who spread the word. And crucially, hundreds of Mumbaikars donated thousands, even lakhs. My friend Sanika Prabhu's mother donated one lakh rupees, despite knowing she wouldn't even be able to attend. In a rare, beautiful surge of collective will, they saved the institution that would later nurture the likes of Rima Das. Don't mistake this for nostalgia. Or vanity. My clickbait title aside, I claim no credit for "saving" MAMI. I was a messenger; the film fraternity's collective zeal was the saviour. No, I write this now because I am obscenely, incandescently angry. Why? Let me quote my own snarky beginning from that 2014 Sify piece, now scrubbed from the internet: 'It seems like the much-awaited yearly art bonanza, the 16-year-old Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI to most and MFF to some) will not see the light of the projector this year. The reason is as old as civilisation – lack of a few pennies. Ok, a lot of pennies. Obviously, the much-fabled large-heartedness of Mumbai, home to 26 billionaires (ranked 6th in the world) and 2,700 multi-millionaires, where 100 crore films have become a norm of sorts, has failed to find the pennies needed to make up 5 crores (less than 1 million USD) to run the festival.' What's changed in eleven years? Mumbai's billionaire count quadrupled (92 in 2024, surpassing Beijing!). It boasts nearly 60,000 millionaires. ₹100 crore films are passé; ₹1000 crore is the new fantasy, even if Bollywood rarely hits it. Back then, I spared no one: 'As for the Government of Maharashtra (which 'supported' MFF by giving a princely sum of Rs. 10 lakh every year) and Government of India (which believes it can serve one sixth of the world's population by financing a huge total of exactly one film festival every year), the less said the better.' I demanded: 'How do you value it? How do you value art? How do you value that which promotes art and culture? How do you judge its importance in the life of a city, nation and world?' I railed against the custodians of wealth: 'O you custodians of money with brand consciousness and PR skills, your sham CSRs and blind PR activities, your money rotting and stinking in Swiss banks, you who understand the price of everything but the value of nothing, you who equate everything to profit and loss who try to draw the map of the human heart over balance sheets… how can anyone show you what a film festival means to the life and breath of a metropolis you yourself reside in.' Do you see it? Change the dates, update the billionaire count, and this same article could run today. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Festival Director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur calls the 2025 miss '..revamping the festival with a dynamic vision,' – a dishonest euphemism for bankruptcy. But is there hope? I remember Mr. Narayanan's grim warning in 2014: a hiatus is a death knell. Reputation shatters. If you couldn't raise funds this year, what hope is there later? So, this is farewell. And you know what? Good riddance. Not because the festival was bad (though, let's be honest, its management was often terrible – but at least we saw the films properly). I say good riddance because we, Mumbai, we, this nation, do not deserve it. We don't deserve the pregnant hush before a masterpiece. We don't deserve luminous visions exploding across forty-foot screens. We deserve the cheap, disposable dopamine hits of Instagram Reels we endlessly, mindlessly scroll – our sensitivity eroded, our empathy drowned in the algorithmic deluge of dead pixels. In 2014, thousands cared enough to fund it. Today? The people are still here, but their hearts have been calloused by the relentless, AI-curated numbness. Blame will fall on Mukesh Ambani. Whispers cite his displeasure with the last edition for withdrawing funding. Critics will note the cost of Rolexes gifted at his family wedding could fund MAMI for years. But I refuse that bitterness. Let's acknowledge the positive: he funded it generously for a decade. I've heard it's over ₹15 crores annually. That's significant. We should appreciate that. But the burning, desperate question remains: Where did all that money go? The festival's quality didn't soar under the new post-2014 management (who, let's note, abandoned ship the moment the funding stopped). If anything, it frayed. For years, I've watched young volunteers scurry out for cheap dhaba lunches near the theatres – gone were the days when even journalists like me were sometimes fed cheap, plastic-packed lunches at the festival. Mukesh Ambani gave over ₹150 crores in a decade. In the pre-2015 MAMI, this would have funded the festival for three decades. But it could only fund ten now? I have no answers. Only scalding questions. A furnace of anger. A choking desperation. And so, with a bitter symmetry that tastes like ashes, I end with the same words I wrote in 2014, believing it was truly over then:'The world won't come to an end if a film festival in a small corner of the world does not exist anymore. Yet, many things of value will die with it. Mumbai would die just a little bit more with the death of the Mumbai Film Festival. And so will something in the heart of each and every Mumbaikar. And all for the want of a few pennies we couldn't find in our pockets.' Back then, Mumbai did find those hundreds of millions of pennies. It saved MAMI till Mr. Ambani funded it for a decade. Can it rally again in 2025? Eleven years older, eleven years wearier, eleven years number? I no longer have hope. Only rage. And a profound, aching grief for the dreams of another Rima Das, another Nagraj Manjule, who will now never find their screen, their light, their tears captured for eternity.
Scroll.in
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Stolen' director Karan Tejpal: ‘The film is about trust and having a conscience'
Karan Tejpal's Stolen was premiered to a rapturous response at the Mumbai Film Festival in 2023. Tejpal's feature debut, about the nightmarish experiences of two affluent brothers who are mistaken for kidnappers in a rural corner of India, was expected to get a theatrical release. Instead, Stolen has been picked up by Prime Video, where it will be streamed from June 4. The Hindi movie's emergence has benefitted from the backing of directors Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani and Vikramaditya Motwane. Written by Tejpal, Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar-Agadbumb, Stolen stars Shubham Vardhan, Abhishek Banerjee, Mia Maelzer, Harish Khanna and Sahidur Rahaman. In an interview, 40-year-old Tejpal described himself as an 'accidental filmmaker'. A product of Mayo College in Ajmer and St Stephen's College in Delhi, Tejpal set out to be a hockey player but instead veered towards cinema. Tejpal worked in the Hindi film industry as an assistant director for several years, starting with Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006). Tejpal squeezed in a filmmaking course at the New York Film Academy, returning to Mumbai to develop scripts and shoot commercials. Stolen was inspired by a lynching that took place in Assam in 2018, a horrific incident that haunts Tejpal to this day, he told Scroll. Here are excerpts from the interview. Stolen is meant for the big screen. Why is it getting a release on a streaming platform? It would have done quite well in theatres. But the theatrical landscape across the world has become muddled with big-ticket films and star-led vehicles. Nobody is willing to take a punt or has a risk-taking appetite any longer. As more and more films with stars fail, this opportunity is shrinking further. In fact, it was a challenge even to get the film onto a streamer. Why is that, considering that Stolen was well received at the Mumbai Film Festival in 2023? It is exactly the kind of movie that streaming platforms are supposed to be championing. It's been an uphill battle. It was eventually only because of the filmmakers who got attached to Stolen as executive producers that we managed to push the film over the line. The Indian landscape is very determined by who is attached to a film. I always thought that if you made a good film, there would be a home for it. The streamers were so busy in the market that you were confident. Perhaps the latest downturn has got them thinking twice about every project. Also, they have backed films that have done poorly on their platforms. That has affected everybody else's chances as well. Every film has its own journey. This has been our journey – a trial by fire. At this point, I am relieved that audiences will get to watch the film. What inspired Stolen? The film was initially a 30-page treatment born out of an incident that took place in Karbi Anglong in Assam. Two men, a musician and a businessman, were wrongly accused of being child kidnappers and were beaten to death by a mob. The videos still give me nightmares. I had already been working as a screenwriter for smaller projects and on advertising films. I met Gaurav Dhingra during an advertising campaign. I pitched the Stolen treatment note. The coronavirus pandemic hit soon after. It was a start-and-stop time for the industry as a whole. We managed to start the shoot in January 2023. Since then, it has been like a bullet train. We shot for 26 days. We were at the Venice Film Festival in August that year. Stolen is set over a night and day, and involves fast-paced action sequences. What went into its making? It was really tough to make. A lot of work went into finding the locations. We shot the film close to where I grew up, in Pushkar, although it isn't set there or any other place in Rajasthan. I was looking for particular things in the locations, and I found them in Pushkar. I've not yet been paid a penny on the film. But what I gave up in terms of a salary, I got back multi-fold in terms of creative freedom to shoot the way I wanted and get the actors I wanted. That's the only way Stolen could have been made. No traditional producer would have let me hire Shubham or Mia, or allow me to shoot long takes. Nearly 50% of the film is one for one – meaning, there are no options for the edit, and you use the scenes as they have been shot. The film was edited in a month, I think. It was a tight schedule. Everything had to be efficient. It was such a rewarding experience that if I had to do it again the same way, I would. What conversations did you have with the cinematographers Isshaan Ghosh and Sachin S Pillai? The in- camera principles were very simple. I wanted the audiences to be on the same journey as my protagonists. I wanted to send viewers on a journey that felt a bit like a social horror. The moment this was decided, every shooting decision was backtracked onto that one principle. We shot 90% of the film with 25mm and 35mm lenses. We decided to shoot only with wide-angle lenses because we wanted an immersive experience that wouldn't be possible with long lenses because then you are looking at things from a distance. Once you have decided on the lenses, the camera position is automatically decided. You need to get close. You're over your main character's shoulder. The perspective becomes very personal because you are in a small space. Since the film is set over the period of a few hours, there are long takes. The less I cut, the more I stay with immediacy. Things are playing out in front of your eyes. There is a crunching of time, a feeling of breathlessness or claustrophobia, which is what the men who inspired the story must have felt like when they were being chased by a mob for no good reason at all. How do you prepare the actors for this kind of a shoot? The five primary actors are all highly trained. Several actors are semi-professional or real persons. Abhishek Banerjee was the first person we went to for the film. Shubham and Abhishek have been friends since college. They are super-close buddies. The chemistry that you see on the screen is real. Abhishek is instinctual and acts from his gut. Shubham is very mental, he performs in his mind. They are different in that sense. Mia Maelzer was cast after I saw some of her films. Harish Khanna and Sahidur Rahaman are again trained actors. It was a collaborative process. Since we shot for such a short period, we did a lot of in-camera rehearsals in advance. The performances were always on the lower scale of the spectrum. Because the shots were complicated and long, the actors were free to do what they had to do because they couldn't repeat the performance. We didn't even have a continuity supervisor. The spontaneity was maintained. If you are shooting from 25 angles and trying to match the shots later, it deadens the performances. What is Stolen saying about the perilous encounter between urban India and rural India? Is it inadvisable to help out in a crisis? The film does talk about the perils of having a conscience. That said, the film is about trust too. Without trust, civilisation would be nowhere, and none of our systems would work. I didn't want to make a nihilistic film. If you have a conscience in this country or anywhere else in the world, you could get into trouble. But have a conscience, do something. Perhaps the film is my callout to myself. Would I stand up in such a situation? I don't have the courage to get out onto the streets and picket against subjects, but perhaps that's why I make movies. The film could be viewed as privilege meeting the rest of India. Absolutely. I come from a privileged background. I got the best education. I belong to a bubble, and I engage with the rest of the country from within that bubble. But the inside and outside worlds intersect in weird ways. The film is about why the two worlds need to coexist, or at least be cognisant of each other. Now that Stolen will be out soon, what are your plans? I'm writing a feature for Mira Nair that will be set in Delhi. I'm also heading the writers' room for the second season of Dahaad. I have a couple of my own projects, one of which is called Umeed, a horror film about a lesbian couple trying to have a baby, written by Abhishek Banerjee, the writer of Pataal Lok and Pari. There's another film I have been working on for a long time, a romantic thriller about a young couple in a taboo relationship. The idea of combining genres with the subjects that I want to talk about is my sort of jam. Play
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First Post
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- First Post
Netflix's 'Black Warrant' actor Rahul Bhat on his film 'Kennedy' being unreleased in India: 'It hurts because...'
Bhat also said, 'It's gone all over the world, and it has been received so well, with a thumping response. It had been to Cannes and within minutes the tickets were sold.' read more Netflix's 'Black Warrant' actor Rahul Bhat did Anurag Kashyap's 2023 thriller Kennedy that was also showcased at the Mumbai Film Festival that year and opened to rave reviews. But it still remains unreleased in India. And talking about the same, the actor said, 'There's a possibility that it will be released this year. We worked so hard on that film. It hurts, because what is acting all about if people don't see? Why do we make movies or art?' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD He added, 'For people to appreciate it, see it, and tell you the good things, criticise you but tell you something! The whole purpose of art is to reach people. If it doesn't reach people, then what's the point?' Bhat also said, 'It's gone all over the world, and it has been received so well, with a thumping response. It had been to Cannes and within minutes the tickets were sold. In Toronto too, tickets were sold the moment they opened it. " He continued, 'Here in Mumbai, I think they said in one-minute tickets were sold. In Kolkata, 2000 people were inside and 3000 were outside! There was a lathi charge. In producero ke kaan mein kuch sunai nahi padta hai ya kya pata nahi (I don't know if this news even reached the producer), it's crazy.' In Kennedy, there's an operatic feel even to the unflinching violence and humor Kashyap establishes in his scenes. There's something gorgeous about the way he shoots brutality. The stretch involving jokes on Covid-19, a quarrelling family, and two gruesome murders in quick succession particularly stands out. Kennedy begins with a quote of William Wordsworth about poets, their gladness, and madness, and despondency. This could also reflect on the characters in the film. The first shot shows Kennedy, the washed out hero, peeling an apple while smoking a cigarette. The never-ending peel comes off smoothly, the man knows how to strip something naked. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD
