The Difficulty of Being Good

The difficulty of building cultural institutions has been brought home by the fracas around the KR Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts in Kottayam. Started in 2014, it was headed by Shankar Mohan, one of the few cinema professionals in the country who was in the Directorate of Film Festivals of India (DFF); it was struck by a student agitation recently. The students protested against alleged casteism by the director, causing Mohan to quit as well as the man who appointed him, one of India’s greatest filmmakers, Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Mohan’s resignation has been followed by 12 other faculty members quitting which has affected the academic credibility of the institution. Gopalakrishnan is naturally disappointed and calls it a scripted attack. He has seen how easy it is to destroy institutions, such as his alma mater the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where he says apart from several short-term courses that dilute the purpose of the institute, students have been completely demoralised. He doesn’t endorse the subsuming of DFF, the Children’s Film Society of India, Films Division and the National Film Archive of India into the National Film Development Corporation. “The government wants an event management agency, not institutions to promote culture,” Gopalakrishnan says. He remembers suggesting the creation of a separate ministry of cinema to the late S Jaipal Reddy who was information and broadcasting minister, but like many good ideas, it remained on paper. Gopalakrishnan, a spry 81, is one of the country’s greatest filmmakers, with his 1972 film Swayamvaram still held up as a model of lyricism. But it is one of the many tragedies of modern, headline-obsessed reportage, that he is remembered mostly in the context of the Kottayam film institute. And that his expertise in understanding how to create the next generation of cinema-literate audiences and filmmakers is not used. He is after all right up there with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen in the depth and breadth of his work. He’s not a great fan of OTT and believes cinema should still be watched the old-fashioned way, in a communal setting, and not on the small screen with other distractions. He believes popular cinema has forgotten that films have to be watched. They now make films to be “listened” to, to be heard. And when this is translated to television, he says, both the highs and lows are wiped out, and all that remains is the medium level, in sound and story.

Vaccine War

After the success of The Kashmir Files, Vivek Agnihotri is now making The Vaccine War, a movie set to bust several myths about the Bharat Biotech anti-Covid vaccine, which he says was actually developed by the Indian Council of Medical Research and National Institute of Virology. “You will be amazed at how ordinary middle-class Indian women made the vaccine, whom you would normally not even bestow a second glance on,” he says. They did it at great cost to themselves and their families, says Agnihotri, but did so uncomplainingly. It is inspiring to see their work, says Agnihotri, adding that while rocket scientists are glamorous role models, virologists are not. The movie will be released around Independence Day. After the success of The Kashmir Files (budget `15 crore and box-office collection `340 crore), Agnihotri was offered `200-crore projects. Several stars approached him as well, but when he went to the same stars to appear in The Vaccine War, he says they declined. “All the top 10 stars, directors and producers do not represent Indian ethos, culture or society,” he says and insists that nothing of note has been produced by the Hindi film industry in the last 10 years. Next up for the permanent outsider in Bollywood? The Delhi Files, for which he has been researching for the past four years. “Bollywood calls itself an industry and then doesn’t do any research and development. I put my own money back into the company,” he says.

Scene and Heard

Gulmohar (Disney+Hotstar, set to release on March 3), starring Sharmila Tagore and Manoj Bajpayee, is about a family that decides to sell its home to divvy up the inheritance rather than have it contested later. It is inspired by a real-life farewell party held at filmmaker Mira Nair’s house. Nair took to Instagram to congratulate the team behind it. One of those who attended was Rahul V Chittella, her talented assistant on The Reluctant Fun

Adoor GopalakrishnanBollywoodcinemaRahul V ChittellaVivek Agnihotri