Film Festival Deptt.

From my Sunday Guardian column:

Among the ‘unmissable’ sights at the recently-concluded 12^th Osian’s Cinefan festival was that of Anurag Kashyap sitting on the stairs behind Siri Fort III, smiling a little sheepishly as excited fans took turns to be photographed sitting next to him. Dibakar Banerjee, walking down a corridor with a small swarm of young men attached to him, swivelling his head around at intermittent intervals to say “dibakarbanerjee@hotmail.com”, came a close second. 

Banerjee and Kashyap, posterboys for a new off-centre Bombay cinema, were both present at the 11^th Osian’s, too. That was 2009, when Festival Director Mani Kaul first introduced a section called NewStream, involving in-depth conversations with directors who were working within the Hindi film industry, pushing for (and getting) commercial releases, but also producing a slow trickle of work that challenged at least some of the tenets of mainstream Bollywood.

In the two years that Osian’s has been in cold storage, that slow trickle has become a steady flow – the first half of 2012 has already seen films as diversely adventurous as Kahaani, Paan Singh Tomar and Vicky Donor become box office hits. Vicky Donor, Paan Singh Tomar and Banerjee’s Shanghai were screened to packed houses at Siri Fort. Many NewStream sessions were also well attended, with their directors and crew members in tow. The second part of Kashyap’s epic Gangs of Wasseypur, now in theatres, had its Indian premiere at the festival, with the tickets drying up almost as soon as they were made available.

Festival purists might look askance at the queues for GoW 2, which were longer and more committed than for any of the 15 World premieres, 13 Asian premieres and 103 other Indian premieres at the festival this year – none of which were due for commercial release in four days. But the queues did bring in a large number of people who might otherwise never attend a film festival, and some who seemed to have never before entered Siri Fort Auditorium.

One couple arrived to buy tickets with their six-year-old and 10-year-old, and seemed surprised and distressed to find that there were actually film theatres in India that wouldn't let their little darlings in. Little did they know how distressed they might have been if they had stumbled, kiddies in tow, into one of the sexually explicit screenings in the Freedom of Creative Expression section– say Pasolini's unwatchably disturbing Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom – or the much-talked-about but tragically underwatched package of contemporary pink (erotic) films from Japan.

I heard at least one 50-something lady giving unsolicited advice to a younger man who simply couldn't contain his disbelief that GoW 2 tickets were already over: "That you can watch in theatres. Why don't you watch some other films?" The man was unimpressed – he may not have watched any Chinese cinema, but he recognised patronising behaviour when he saw it.

There were the usual festival encounters, too: a documentary filmmaker complaining that PVR Director's Rare was actually sabotaging indies by releasing them in expensive theatres that were too far from her house; young men insisting that the Bangladeshi film, Meherjaan, could not be watched because it had Jaya Bachchan in it and "how can you bear her?"; people sharing shock, awe, rants and raves.

Barring a small core of film festival junkies, though, the crowds at Osian's seemed new and largely young. Many seemed to be media students and aspiring filmmakers, who made their presence felt at screenings, asking technical-sounding questions about kinds of cameras and natural light that might have been annoying if they weren't so utterly sincere.

They may not have been mobbed like Kashyap or Banerjee, but there were appreciative audiences and admiring fans for many other Indian filmmakers. The superb Marathi film Masala, directed by debut director Sandesh Kulkarni (but produced and written by Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni and Girish Kulkarni of Deool fame) had its share, as did cinematographer Ajay Bahl's directorial debut BA Pass, based on Mohan Sikka's story The Railway Aunty, Dhiraj Meshram's Baromas: a Marathi novel about Vidarbha farmers turned into a Hindi film, and Prashant Bhargava's high on atmosphere, low on plot, Patang.

There has been some sniffing about BA Pass winning Best Indian Film, perhaps because its noirish air of deliberate excess is being (mis)read as melodrama. The best Indian films at the festival were either not in competition (Masala) or had been placed in the wider First Features category: Bikramjit Gupta's Achal (The Stagnant), a profoundly atmospheric meditation on contemporary Kolkata, and the more crowd-pleasing Hansa, which won Manav Kaul an Audience Award and a Jury award.

The range of Indian films somehow emerging in the shadow of Bollywood and every-other-wood certainly deserves celebration. But then one looks at a Baromas and wishes it didn't have that lavani item song thrust in. One watches the marvelously unpredictable Modest Reception from Iran or the superbly understated Beyond the Hills and wonders when we'll make films like these. Perhaps, when we stop taking photos of Kashyap and Co and start sitting around in the Siri Fort lawns actually talking cinema.

Half-century Advertising Deptt: Utterly, Butterly Delicious

From my Sunday Guardian column:

In the year 1966, the advertising campaign for a butter brand was assigned to an agency in Bombay. The brand, which had already been in the market for 10 years, was "processed from the purest milk under the most hygienic conditions by a dairy co-operative in Gujarat". Sylvester DaCunha, who headed the advertising agency, was quite clear that that positioning — and the existing tag line, 'Purely the Best'— was not going to cut it. He mentioned the campaign to his wife Nisha. "Why don't you say 'Utterly Amul'?" she said. To which (Sylvester tells us), he added, "Hey, what about, 'Utterly butterly Amul'?"

This is the sort of behind-the-scenes event fiction writers dream of. The hugely popular Mad Men — an ongoing American TV series about New York advertising executives, also set in the 1960s — contains at least one narrative where the winning campaign is something the 'wife' comes up with. Megan Draper's success with Heinz baked beans — "Some things never change" — is her tumultuous first and last foray into advertising. Nisha DaCunha's spontaneous suggestion to her husband led to a campaign that has lasted over 50 years.

Based on Sylvester's 'instinctive' feeling that Amul's emblem "should be a child, someone impish and loveable", his art director Eustace Fernandes created the "charming little poppet in a polka-dotted frock" that we know as the Amul girl.

One of the first Amul ads

The cheeky humour of the Amul girl, punning her way through years of Indian public life and popular culture, can now be enjoyed in a book: Amul's India, released last fortnight by HarperCollins. By Delhi book launch standards, it was an unusually formal affair. The people gathered in the large new Multi Purpose Hall at the India International Centre to listen to Rahul DaCunha (Sylvester's son, who has handled the agency for 20 years) did not know each other at all. Journalists and publishing faces were few. The audience, seated in rows on white-cloth-covered metal chairs was quiet, orderly and familial, as on a TV talk show.

The feeling was confirmed when Barkha Dutt arrived to host a panel discussion, followed by DaCunha, columnist Swapan Dasgupta and commentator Santosh Desai, best known for his regular Times of India column, City City Bang Bang. "Santosh is a Bombay boy who's moved to Delhi," DaCunha ribbed Desai. "Which city is his column about, I'd like to know!"

The Bombay-centric origin of the campaign is crucial. DaCunha talked about how what began with a single hoarding on Bhulabhai Desai Road has grown into an all-India campaign, with 132 billboards on 90 sites in 69 cities. The writers chosen for the volume, whether cricketing and film icons or social commentators, are almost all Bombay-based: from Amitabh Bachchan and Sunil Gavaskar to Shobhaa De and Rajdeep Sardesai.

Sardesai sees Amul hoardings as shaping elements of the genteel cocoon that was 1970s South Bombay. This South Bombay constituency is clearly core for Amul, its anti-politician consensus sharply revealed in ads like the one after 26/11, where a politician is shown surrounded by security guards, with the line, 'Will the real terrorist please stand up?'. True to that imaginary, Amul marked the 1995 renaming of Bombay into Mumbai with a teary Amul girl looking out wistfully at the city's skyline: the text read "Bom Bye!"

And yet, Amul also consciously seeks to transcend that English-speaking elite cosmopolitan image for a wider one. So they also produced a "My Mumbai, Love it or Leave it" ad, showing the Amul girl in five different regional costumes.

That the campaign has always been in English itself is a fascinating fact. To Dutt's question about whether Indians can laugh at ourselves, DaCunha responded that a 90s ad, which targeted Laloo Yadav's with the line 'Fodder of the Nation: Scamul', went by without any incident, but he could not run the recent 'Kol-kartoon' ad in Kolkata for fear of reprisal by Mamata Banerjee. But as Dasgupta pointed out, that was because no-one in Laloo's constituency was English-speaking. The increase in prickly reactions, he added, is crucially inflected by the fact that more and more people are now able to partially understand — and thus misconstrue — Amul ads.

Another fertile idea in the book is Alpana Parida's suggestion that the Amul girl draws on the mythical butter-loving Krishna: "The natkhat Krishna has become the iconic persona that all mothers seek in their child when they say with great pride that their son is 'very naughty'. In that context, the Amul girl is Bal Krishna!" Parida is definitely on to something here. But she doesn't dwell enough on the campaign's fascinating transformation of the 'naughty boy' — the son whose bad behaviour pretty much all Indian parents are likely to indulge — into the 'naughty girl'.

In real life India, a daughter's transgressions are much less likely to be condoned. Perhaps the fictional, not-real quality of the Amul girl, who allows us to laugh at ourselves, has also enabled a quietly radical transformation in how much middle-class Indians indulge their daughters.

Oddball Publicity Deptt: Shanghai meets Bharat Mata in JNU

This week's 'Post Facto' column.

Five days before his new film was due to be released, director Dibakar Banerjee made an unexpected visit to his hometown. "Shanghai to meet bulls***cutters of JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University)", ran the Delhi Times (DT) headline. "Basically, we wanted to discuss the film with people who actually want change, who can make a difference," DT quoted Banerjee as saying. "When we usually promote a film, say in a mall, there are barriers, stars, crowds, a lot of glamour, but here, we want Emraan, Abhay and Kalki to share their experiences, thoughts and ideas with the actual students at JNU. Some of them there are real bulls***cutters, and their engagement with the film will be entirely different, it'll be something I'd like to understand."

The previous afternoon, a Facebook page for the event, titled Anda & Chai with Shanghai had sent invites to 5,139 people; of whom 4 declined, 43 said 'Maybe' and 136 were 'Going'.
Facebook is clearly not a good predictor of actual attendance. At 9.15pm, more than 350 people had gathered outside the JNU Students' Union office. The event was scheduled for 9pm, a standard post-dinner time for events in JNU. There was no sign of the speakers yet, but the atmosphere was one of relaxed anticipation. Some wandered off to eat an aloo paratha at the adjoining Teflas canteen, while others more far-sighted held on to their seats. Little of the usual high-octane excitement around star appearances in India was in evidence.

Then, a little after 10pm, the song Bharat Mata Ki Jai began to play. Two white BMWs pulled up, disgorging Dibakar Banerjee, Kalki Koechlin, Abhay Deol and several security men in black. A buzz ran through the crowd, and there was cheering and whooping.

{	One boy objects to the song Bharat Mata ki Jai, which he says sounds like an item number. “The film does have an item number. But this is an angry song, a song full of sarcasm,” says Banerjee.

When Deol and Koechlin had finished waving, the moderator — Mihir Pandya, a Delhi University PhD student who's authored a book called Shaher aur Cinema: Via Dilli — tried valiantly to steer the discussion to the politics of Banerjee's cinema, but the director seemed reluctant. "Yeh kucch zyaada intellectual baat inhone keh di," he said. Adopting a faux-lighthearted air, he repeated a Delhi Times line about coming to JNU for anda and chai and being "eaten alive by mosquitoes". No-one laughed.

Then Banerjee began to talk about what led him to make Shanghai (he pronounced it American style: 'Shang-High'), and the awkwardness disappeared. "I live in Bombay now, in a building called Dosti Flamingos," he said in crisp Delhi Hindi, "My wife and I paid a lot of money for this flat. One day the building guard told me: 'Yahan par hamara mill thha, yahan par hamari chawl thi, wahaan bachhon ke khelne ka ground thha.' He didn't say it sadly; he was glad he and his wife had jobs in the new complex. Par main chakra gaya. I kept thinking: How is it possible that where you lived yesterday is where you are a safai karamchari today?" "In Bombay's unauthorised colonies, everything is authorised: it's very clean, there are courtyards, lanes, a Shiv Sena office: it's very organised." The crowd assumed sarcasm and there was laughter. "I mean it," Banerjee cut in. "From the 20th floor, I can see the local Shiv Sena office. And every night there is a street party. Har roz sangeet, celebration: a wedding, a religious occasion or a political one. At midnight, my wife or I call up the police to complain. Once they shut it down, then we sleep... But if someone is pregnant and needs a taxi in the middle of the night, it's the Shiv Sena guys who'll arrange it." "This strange, blind pragati ki hawa that uproots everything in its path — that is what my film is about," said Banerjee. "When people who belong to a place are made to feel that they have no right to the land – that's when parties like Shiv Sena thrive." The floor was opened to questions. One boy objected to the song Bharat Mata Ki Jai, which he says sounds like an item number. "It looks like you're not too acquainted with item numbers," said Banerjee dryly. "The film does have an item number. But this is an angry song, a song full of sarcasm." Another questioner told Banerjee that he didn't respect the country which had given him the freedom to make such a film: "You've made a film called Shanghai, but Cheen mein aapko kuchal diya jaata." Banerjee's retort was quick and sharp. "If we don't encourage more disrespect, there'll be nothing left to take pride in." The crowd got thicker, the mobile cameras increased. The half-French Koechlin, having been quizzed on her Hindi and why her husband Anurag Kashyap didn't cast her in the Bihar-set Gangs of Wasseypur, was drawn away by a TV crew. A questioner attacked Banerjee for "justifying" son-of-the-soil movements. "You have to see the larger picture," he said. "I completely agree," said Banerjee, his voice finally rising to tower over the crowd. "Come and see my film."