Reel struggle

Low-budget indie films are slowly making strides and bridging the divide between masala and artsy cinema. Investment banker-turned filmmaker OP Srivastava’s sixth project What’s Your Story? explores this ecosystem. In this documentary, Srivastava asks whether independent filmmaking is sustainable as a business model in the long run. After all, passion alone is not enough to tell a story. The feature also examines how the transition to the OTT space is giving indie cinema a new voice and helping it grow at a time when no organised support for such cinema exists. 

Srivastava believes that the medium of filmmaking is on the brink of a revolution. “Technologically, OTT platforms have changed the way films will be viewed in the days to come—from being a ‘community experience’ to a personalised experience,” he says. The platform is the new star as opposed to the hero. The future, according to Srivastava, is made-to-order films. “Filmmaking, which was considered an art, may undergo a dramatic transformation and become a product of technology,” adds the filmmaker whose first film, Missed Call (2005), represented India at the Cannes Film Festival, and his first documentary, Life in Metaphors (2015), won the National Award for Best Biopic.

Srivastava—who is currently working on the pre-production of his upcoming film tentatively titled Fish Curry and Khasta Kachori—has so far used personal savings to fund his films. Concerned about indie films’ financial viability, he began talking to various independent filmmakers and stakeholders to understand their strategy and motivation, and found that each had a different story to tell. Director Devashish Makhija took two years to make 16 films. In 2009, his animated film with the Yash Raj banner was shelved. His 2017 film Ajji managed a nationwide release in only 35 screens for just a week. Makhija says, “Unlike commercial films, indie films have no set roadmap.

The reason why audiences, producers and the distribution network don’t want indie films is because they make people uncomfortable.” While Makhija may be too harsh a critic, film journalist Vanita Kohli-Khandekar points out that some of the biggest names today, such as Anurag Kashyap, started off as independent filmmakers. Director of the popular Netflix web series—Jamtara—Soumendra Padhi also does not agree with Makhija. He says, “Viewers today are open and ready to try out different kinds of content.” And so are filmmakers. 

Director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan made his film Ozhivudivasathe Kali without a script. Created as an audio-visual experience, the film was captured naturally as it happened on camera. Rajat Kapoor, who directed Ankhon Dekhi, explains, “This is exactly the advantage of indie films—they are independent of subjects, fashion trends and the current market.”

Such perspectives and more along with clips of their films are interspersed in Srivastava’s documentary. It also has the voices of cinematographers, film writers, journalists and aggregators. At the end of the day, the essence of the documentary is summed up by what Amartya Bhattacharyya, the director of Benares, believes, “Cinema is a cerebral experience and while commercial films are manufactured through a proper process and infrastructure, indie films are pure art or poetry. Though such films are the stuff that dreams are made of, they are not very financially viable.” 

Maybe it’s time producers took note.