Why can’t a film made with Indian funding compete at Cannes?

What does the international market bring to these filmmakers? Higher budgets, networks with foreign filmmakers and crew members, work-in-progress labs, opportunities for global sales and distribution, and international acclaim. However, these opportunities come with a cost. Many are conflicted by their participation in “labs” that flatten film form to character-driven narratives that feed into the Western, almost colonial, gaze toward Indian social and political realities. For example, filmmakers Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla, directors of the 2016 documentary An Insignificant Man, withdrew from a co-production with a French producer when they felt the creative integrity of their project was being compromised.

These are a few of the many difficult decisions filmmakers must make while ensuring their films see the light of day. A few years ago, OTT platforms in India seemed promising for revitalising the independent filmmaking ecosystem in the country. However, many have, rather disappointingly, played their own role in homogenising formats, especially for documentary films — too obsessed with “true crime” stories while almost always avoiding any content that may be deemed controversial in the current political scenario.

Support, reorient and experiment

So, how can the problem be addressed? First, state bodies like the National Film Development Corporation must decentralise and proliferate regionally to champion unconventional narratives and support filmmakers from diverse backgrounds. In the past, NFDC has worked with some of the most acclaimed filmmakers, producing films that have been pivotal to Indian cinema history and culture; it is time to reorient itself toward emerging and early-career filmmakers. Most importantly, what is needed is an environment and an institutional ethos that allows filmmakers to fearlessly and boldly experiment with the art of cinema outside of commercial interests.

Can the state film boards across the country be revived? How can we work with the international market? How can we work through its structures, and how can we diversify its approach? What are the potential untapped resources and new modes of production we can explore? How do we make space for different kinds of practices to thrive?

Collectively, we can thrive

On our part, as filmmakers, programmers, academics, and researchers, it is time to reconfigure the idea of independence and give way to the idea of the collective. As we grapple with the challenges of production and distribution, we must develop internal ecosystems of support and collaboration, coming together to share resources and navigate through the political, aesthetic, and economic impositions of funding agencies. The assertion of our independent practices harks rather romantically to an imagined outside, where regimes of power supposedly hold no sway. But we urgently need to recognise that there is no longer an outside to the global flow of capital, and it is only through collective practice that we can find a way, push boundaries of form and aesthetics, and ultimately, imagine a new narrative to confront existing structures of power.

As Payal Kapadia’s nomination reverberates globally, it serves as a rallying cry for a revival of the ecosystem for independent filmmakers in India. And that support has to come from within, from the state-funded bodies and film practitioners alike.

The writer is a filmmaker currently teaching at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai