Pushing the Envelope

Indian filmmakers usually approach the Oscars from an emotional standpoint. It’s either something they covet or pretend they don’t. When Aamir Khan launched a campaign for Lagaan (2001) to win Best Foreign Film, he made it almost a national movement, becoming only the third film from India to be nominated. Subsequent Indian films have tried to crack the Oscar enigma, without any luck. So it comes as a welcome change to see Pan Nalin and Dheer Momaya approach Last Film Show’s potential nomination as a science, and not an accidental art. The film is being distributed in the US by Samuel Goldwyn Films and internationally by Orange Studio which got Floran Zeller’s The Father (2021) and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (2011) nominated for Best Picture. Orange has been backing Last Film Show for a year; so they were waiting for India to nominate the film, says Momaya. Over the last four years, Samuel Goldwyn has won four nominations and one award for Another Round (2020). “The process is very open, it is our job to show the film to as many voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) as possible. The second and third highest number of members is in the UK and France, so Orange Studio helps there. It is also being shown to small but influential groups of voters of AMPAS,” says Momaya. One recent event was at the Mill Valley Film Festival where the who’s who of the Academy take time out to watch movies in their flip flops with a glass of wine and where it won Audience Favourite Award. But that’s not enough. The film must be advertised in the American trade magazine, on hoardings and through word of mouth. That needs money. Nalin and Momaya feel that Last Film Show has enough qualities to enrapture a majority of AMPAS members, if not all 10,000 of them, with the new emphasis on diversity and inclusivity. Add to that Nalin’s reputation in the West as a filmmaker from India whose films have made money at the box office abroad by being sufficiently local and universal at the same time. Both Nalin, a member of AMPAS, and Momaya know this is a money battle as well, likely to get bigger as more streamers enter. This year, for instance, Apple TV+ bet big on CODA. Says Nalin: “You can’t fight the machinery, but in the end it is about how many AMPAS members talk about it.” Their partners, Film Heritage Foundation of India and Kodak, will help film lovers watch it, says Nalin. “A story well told which pushes the cinematic envelope should win hearts,” he adds. His films have attracted non-diaspora audiences—Samsara (2001), a Ladakhi film, made $35 million globally and was released by Miramax in 60 countries but on a mere 30 screens in India—and don’t deserve to be called mere ‘festival films’. “These are horrible tags we give our films,” says Momaya.

The Queen’s Challenge

The last time we spoke to Madhuri Dixit, while she was promoting The Fame Game on Netflix, she said she was learning tennis. She’s picked up quite a bit of the sport. She has played a Gujarati homemaker in Amazon Prime Video’s Maja Ma who discovers that she loves women, and has always done so. It took her just two or three days to say yes to Anand Tiwari, who dreamt big by writing it for her. Dixit’s image as a dancing star is so strong that it is easy to forget her taking risks, whether it was playing a grey character in Pukar (2000) or a single mother in her much-touted comeback film Aaja Nachle (2007), or even the naughty courtesan in Dedh Ishqiya (2014). “I believe in making people realise their own power. This was a story that needed to be told. When you take a risk, you challenge yourself, you go a step forward, you grow as an artist and as a person. Life is one challenge after another. Maja Ma’s Pallavi is a wife, a mother, daughter, yet has her own identity. It gave me a lot of fodder for thought,” says Dixit. For Tiwari, Dixit is a cultural phenomenon with great power who also understands her responsibility. “So that same conversation can travel 240 countries. When you have her can you say something important in an entertaining way that people don’t feel schooled?” he adds. This conversation is also across generations, adds Dixit, who got tweeted by a girl who saw it with her mother and grandmother.

Scene and Heard

The amateurish VFX in Om Raut’s trailer of the forthcoming Adipurush suddenly brought back a lot of love for Anubhav Sinha’s Ra.One (2011) which was excoriated at the time it was released for being derivative and ham-handed. Who’s laughing now? Someone sitting in Mannat for sure.

BollywoodcinemaDheer MomayaMadhuri DixitPan Nalin