Arfi Lamba: Homemade Export

Arfi Lamba was the guy in the call centre class who could not keep up with the chaiwala in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. After landing up at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, Lamba never looked back, setting up the Bombay Berlin Film Productions with Katharina Suckale from Germany to make films for the global market. It has not been an easy journey for the boy from Moga, where he was taught English in school by the mother of another Moga boy, Sonu Sood. Lamba trained to be an engineer to make his mother happy but ended up as an actor, trying to make it in Mumbai. While the city of dreams still keeps him out of the doors that matter, he has not lost heart, and has slowly built a viable career for himself as a producer who can raise money internationally and drive the movies he wants to make. But he continues to act, not only in his own films. He has been in Fugly (2014), Singh is Bliing (2015) and Love in the Time of Corona (2021). Lamba says jokingly, “I blame Shah Rukh Khan, for making it seem so easy to break into the Mumbai film industry.” The independent film industry is struggling in India, he admits, with streaming platforms behaving exactly as the traditional exhibitors, betting on the big stars and accepting only movies that have had a theatrical release first. “We got a good price for Loev,” he says, of his 2015 queer romantic production, but that was only because it was bought by Netflix America. But he sees some green shoots in the success, no matter how limited, of movies such as Avinash Arun’s Three of Us (2022), Varun Grover’s All India Rank (2023), and even Anamika Haksar’s 2018 movie Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon. He is an outsider but he has not given up, continuing to act and produce. As an actor, Lamba will soon be seen in the dark comedy Avani. And if you are at Cannes, you are bound to run into him—it is a festival he has been to almost every year since 2008.

The Japanese Season

It was a comment made recently at a book release function in Delhi by journalist Nyay Bhushan and it got one thinking about India as a pop cultural phenomenon. Bhushan spoke of how this has been Japan’s year as a cultural trendsetter. There was Perfect Days, a wonderful meditation on life, a German-Japanese co-production in 2023, directed by Wim Wenders; this year’s Shogun, an American historical drama with a mostly Japanese cast, including its star Hiroyuki Sanada, and the majority of the dialogue in Japanese; and Godzilla Minus One, produced by Toho Studios and Robot Communications and distributed by Toho, a Japanese entertainment company. What makes a country ‘hot’ globally will always be a mystery to those who track such waves but India has been on the cusp of this twice in the recent past, with Slumdog Millionaire sweeping the Oscars in 2009 and then RRR sparking curiosity in 2022. But a country’s cultural establishment needs to follow up such a moment with some well-oiled diplomacy. Will Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, which has gone to the Toronto International Film Festival after winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, be the breakout hit at the Oscars this year and make it to Best Foreign Film? Critics are suggesting it will. And will it finally mean that the world is ready to look beyond the glitter of Bollywood?

Rewind

When was the last time a telephone song in Hindi cinema made you cry? I can think back to Baghban (2003) when Amitabh Bachchan is singing to Hema Malini. Both senior citizens, man and wife, have been divided by their children and made to live separately. The song, ‘Main yahan tu wahan’, still has the ability to move you. However, few songs can be as touching as the one between Sunil Dutt and Nutan in Sujata in 1959. The song, ‘Jalte hain jiske liye meri aankhon ke diye’, is a classic for the way Bimal Roy shot it, and the emotions it portrays. The phone song was quite a staple of the sixties’ romance, suggesting modernity as well as a way of seeking out intimacy in a world where dating was still frowned upon. The phone continues to be an instrument of making and breaking relationships but the romance is gone. The phone is now either an instrument of scamming (the Netflix series Jamtara shows this best), seduction (Ayushmann Khurrana in Dream Girl 2) or of stalking (Ananya Panday in Netflix’s Kho Gaye Hum Kahan). Whatever happened to the slow burn of the slow telephone?

Arfi LambaBollywoodcinemaHiroyuki SanadaSunil Dutt