Applied Languages

As the dust settles in the wake of this year’s Cannes International Film Festival, production houses are moving in to cash in on regional language cinema—this festival’s surprise big hit with buyers—which has customarily been relegated to the sidelines as Bollywood’s less glamorous stepsister.

Buoyed by unprecedented demand at Cannes for films in various Indian languages, studios are lining up to take their slates to key festivals this year, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Locarno International Film Festival.

Sales agents and festival directors, their appetites whetted by the runaway success of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, are, meanwhile, combing through the pipeline of releases with an eye on sourcing cinema that has global appeal. “There was a lot of interest in the arthouse slate from festival directors, and we are now really pushing the boundaries,” said Mahesh Ramanathan, chief operating office of BIG Pictures, which took six regional language films to Cannes this year and reported robust interest from buyers, but declined to disclose figures. “The regional language cinema directors are more attuned to world cinema. Regional language cinema is made for world cinema. It is not an ‘either or’ situation between the Hindi cinema and the regional languages; however, Hindi films which are tuned to the mainstream, are not made for festivals. They are more commercial.”

Ramanathan, who took a slate of films, including Shaji N. Karun’s Kutty Srank, in Malayalam, as well as Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s The Window, in Bengali, to Cannes and is planning a whirlwind tour of festivals across the world this year, added that the interest from buyers in regional language films represents a real opportunity for Indian film-makers.

Jerome Paillard, director of the Marche du Film, or Cannes Film Market, called for India to protect its regional language film-makers. “We are waiting for another Satyajit Ray to emerge from India, but it seems the country currently does not give its film-makers the sort of environment that is needed for that to happen,” he commented at the festival.

According to 2008 figures from industry body Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, films in India are made in 22 languages, with only 257 of the country’s annual output of 1,000 films being made in Hindi. Telugu films are a close second with 241, and Tamil takes third place with 149 films.

Read more: Livemint