When Bauddhayan Mukherji went to Kolkata from Mumbai in early July to supervise the release of his Bengali production, Manikbabur Megh (The Cloud and the Man), he told his colleagues at Little Lamb Films to expect him back in seven days. It’s been six weeks and he has still not returned, happily overwhelmed by the steady, incremental success of his small, independent venture that few were willing to wager on.
It was released during the monsoons, not considered an opportune time for business. “But for a film about the bond between a man and a cloud, we wanted the audience to come out of the theatres and look up at the sky,” says Mukherji. The gamble appears to have paid off.
The debut directorial of Abhinandan Banerjee, Manikbabur Megh is a rumination in black and white on seclusion and companionship, life and death, that boasts of neither big stars nor popular songs. Despite that, it completed an unprecedented 25-day run last Sunday with a 780-strong audience in attendance at Kolkata’s Nandan theatre. This weekend, it opened in Pune and spread its wings to Chicago and Fremont in the US. The public love has come more than 2.5 years after its world premiere at Tallinn Black Nights and subsequent screenings in 38 international film festivals.
It’s a rare success story for a profound, meditative movie that bucks the dominant trend of Indian independent cinema not being able to find a passage back home despite garnering critical acclaim and awards abroad.
Indies have for the longest been deprived of a workable distribution and exhibition system that has always been risk-averse and heavily skewed towards mainstream commercial films. Even the OTT platforms are going back on their promise of diversified, independent content, and are demanding theatrical release of films before considering them for acquisition.
It’s then necessary for indies to work out alternatives. And Manibabur Megh is not the only one. This independence day, a small gem from Meghalaya, Dominic Sangma’s Garo film Rapture, on the issues of xenophobia and intolerance, is aiming for an unfettered run in theatres. It comes home a year after its world premiere in Locarno in August 2023 and a successful commercial release in France in May 2024.
Community-based ticketed screenings of the film are being personally organised in the Garo Hills in Meghalaya by Sangma and his producer, Eva Gunme Marak, hiring local auditoriums and projectors. There will be three daily shows in the initial phase spread over 10 days. Sangma is hoping to subsequently take it to Shillong and Guwahati. A throwback to the model followed by Bardroy Baretto for his modest 2014 Konkani film, Nachom-Ia Kumpasar (Let’s Dance To The Rhythm) on jazz singer Lorna Cordeiro.
Yet another young, talented filmmaker, Sumanth Bhat, also decided to take an unusual route to reach out to audiences for Ekam, a new anthology series in Kannada, Tulu and Malayalam languages that is deeply rooted in Karavali in coastal Karnataka and celebrates the region, its people, food and culture. Completed in mid-2021, it went through 2.5 years of a trying process of reaching out to the streamers. “They didn’t even watch it. Kannada content is the last in the pecking order on OTTs,” says Bhat. So, the team decided to release the series on July 13 on its own exclusive online platform, ekamtheseries.com. “The idea is to build a democratic online distribution system beyond the existing modes,” says Bhat. The `149 price provides unlimited access to all the seven shorts with bonuses like a ‘script bible’ and screenplays. The idea is to “let no barriers remain between the creators and the audience”.
Similarly, the fiercely feminist independent filmmaker Leena Manimekalai has also created her own video on demand channel where one can rent a curated set of her films.
Will these indie release models be one-off experiments? Or replicable for others?
Each indie film is unique and needs to have its own strategy in place. There must be an understanding of the core audience, finding the right niche and interested communities in viable pockets to then promote it and ensure that they come for the screenings.
Mukherji feels it’s essential to tie up with a distributor or exhibitor, like he partnered with Inox, and have a limited, staggered release. Endorsements and support from influential voices and word of mouth promotion through social media are the key. There is also a need for small, boutique properties like Siri Fort or Films Division auditoriums in Delhi to serve the cause of alternative cinema.
For language films, the start should be on the home turf. In the light of the extraordinary buzz in Bengal, Mukherji feels his film would have done much better in other centres were it released there a few weeks later than simultaneously with Kolkata. Of course, there’s an element of gamble involved here. What if the film proves to be dead on arrival?
The audience must also walk the talk. There might be a lot of curiosity around indies, but people aren’t going to the theatres to watch them—at times because of inconvenient venues and showtimes, at others for too much else vying for their limited attention span. With established names like Rakshit Shetty and Raj B Shetty on board, the trailer of Ekam drew a lot of attention, but that didn’t translate into as big a viewership as anticipated. Bhat feels the audience is not willing to pay anything more than Rs 99 when it comes to the pay-per-view model—one of the earliest ones here being Moviesaints.
So it appears that indie filmmakers will have to go beyond being creative to spend a lot of their time and energy wooing viewers. “It’s no longer about filmmaking alone,” says Sangma. It’s about being cinema warriors and evangelists for building a whole new viewing culture.
Namrata Joshi
Consulting Editor
Follow her on X @Namrata_Joshi