Zoya Akhtar is no stranger to the world of international film festivals. The anthology film, Bombay Talkies, in which she directed one of the four segments, featured in the Cannes Film Festival, 2013, as Gala Screening in the Tribute to India segment. Gully Boys premiered in Berlinale in 2019 and The Archies at the International Film Festival of India in 2023.
Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon, produced by Akhtar, is premiering in Toronto, it played in the Red Sea International Film Festival and is set to travel to Palm Springs in January 2025. Akhtar is also a board member of the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) which organises the Mumbai Film Festival.
However, the recently concluded 21st Marrakech International Film Festival has been Akhtar’s first outing as a member of the jury. The director-producer-writer had a quick word with us on her experience, seeing a diverse set of films and discussing them in the company of cinema giants and fellow jury members like filmmaker-writer and head of the jury Luca Guadagnino, actors Patricia Arquette, Andrew Garfield, Jacob Elordi, and filmmaker-writers Ali Abbasi and Santiago Mitre among others.
Excerpts:
It’s a first for you on a festival jury. How has the experience been so far?
Fantastic! It’s all new and fresh and I’m so excited. I am actually beginning to envy your job. I told Srishti (Behl Arya, film producer and Akhtar’s companion on the trip) how wonderful it must be to be a film critic, to watch movies all day. For me, it’s what I do on my day off. I watch films. So for me, this feels like a few days off in Marrakesh. It’s a wonderful feeling. Moreover, it’s an amazingly organized festival.
I saw a film which is about a village near Somalia. I saw one documentary about a nomadic family from Mongolia. I saw a documentary on the revolution of the kids in Sudan. I saw a film on Algerian immigrants in Paris. These are worlds that I don’t normally dip into. Plus the jury is a banging bunch of people, so bright, so diverse, everybody’s from a different place on the map.
So, I assume with an experience like this you’d be game to serve on more festival juries…
Happily. You meet people, you get diverse points of view. It’s a treat to have Santiago Mitre, Luca Guadagnino, Ali Abbasi and, of course, all the actors sit there and give their perspective on a movie and break a film down. I’m just listening and taking in how people look at different cultures and how they see a film. It’s a lot of learning also. I would be happy to repeat this. I’d be happy if anyone gave me movies to watch. There’s no complaining. I make movies because I watch movies. I’m an audience first. I love watching films.
Is the way of looking at films, of filmmakers and film professionals, very different from that of the critics? Is there more of an empathy with which a filmmaker approaches the work of a fellow filmmaker? Or can you get brutal?
I think empathetic people have empathy and brutal people are brutal. They are brutal with themselves and they’re brutal with other films. I think that’s a personality thing. I really go with what has moved me. Have I felt anything? It’s very important for me to feel something, and it doesn’t have to be anything sad, deep or profound. No, it can be the lightest thing, but it has to touch me in a warm way. So I just react to how I’m feeling. A hundred people could have liked a film, but it may not have worked for me. A film no one likes could work for me. I think it’s your personality that also comes in along with the fact that you’re a filmmaker, so you can spot a real, true moment that has been captured as opposed to a sham one.
You said you’ve been to Marrakech earlier…
We came here in 2012 because the festival celebrated the centenary of Indian cinema. Mr Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, and Karan Johar were here. They did a very beautiful tribute to Indian cinema because people here love Hindi movies. They played Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara along with other films in the historic Jemaa el-Fna square.
And your own production Superboys of Malegaon is travelling to festivals around the world…
Reema Kagti, Farhan Akhtar and all are leaving for the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah. I’m going to miss it. I’m going straight to Abu Dhabi for the recce for a commercial. I’m going to meet Reema there. We are working on something together, and then I head for Mumbai.
So what are you working on currently?
We are writing our scripts. Reema and I are working on several things. We are writing a show, not for India. We are working on two scripts, one for her, and one for me. And we are releasing two documentary series. We have one environmental documentary called Turtle Walker and another called In Transit, which is with Prime Video. It’s a four-part series on the trans community in India. So, those are the things we are releasing and writing and developing.