Movies Without Accents: MIAAC Film Festival Director L. Somi Roy

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Sunday, 22 November 2009 18:43

Written by Laura Blum

In Today’s Special, a food comedy co-written by Aasif Mandvi, The Daily Show funnyman plays an aspiring chef who gets the American girl by mastering Indian cuisine. He cooked up the right festival. Opening the 9th Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIAACFF), Mandvi’s saga joined with other selections from India and the Diaspora that mix East and West.

MIAACFF 09 featured five days of premiere screenings and Q&A, industry panels and networking parties attended by filmmakers, talent and suits. From opening night’s red carpet and gala held on November 11th to closing night’s awards ceremony which took place on the 15th, the media had Mira Nair, Shabana Azmi, Rahul Bose, Sarita Choudhury, Deepti Naval, Madhur Jaffrey, Sharmila Tagore, Shyam Benegal, Kalyan Roy and other Bollywood and independent Indian stars to keep their bulbs constantly flashing. 

As for one of the brightest names on the marquee -- The Mahindra Group -- the $6.3 billion company behind the festival is a leading manufacturer of multi-utility vehicles and IT services, to name two of its market sectors. Also powering New York’s annual Indian film bash is the Indo-American Arts Council, founded by Executive Director Aroon Shivdasani to advance Indian and cross-cultural art forms in North America.

Last year’s festival served up British director Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which went on to win eight Oscars and whet Western appetites for South Asian cinema at a time of growing Indian power in Hollywood and beyond. MIAACFF's 2009 run reaped the windfall. Not only did its 44 fiction features, documentaries and shorts premiere to packed New York houses, but its FILMINDIA seminars kept football fans away from the Iowa vs Ohio State competition for the Big Ten championship.



The films that took the 2009 MIAAC Award were:

Best Short Film Award: Good Night by Geetika Narang
Best Documentary Film Award: The Salt Stories by Lalit Vachani
Best Actor Award: Aasif Mandvi for Today’s Special
Best Actress Award: Tannishtha Chatterjee for Bombay Summer
Best Screenplay Award: Two Paise for Sunshine, Four Annas for Rain, by Deepti Naval
Best Director Award: Joseph Mathew-Varghese for Bombay Summer
Best Film Award: Bombay Summer, by Joseph Mathew-Varghese

Distinguished programming encompassed a Kashmir sidebar, MIAAC @ NYU panels ranging from Queer Bollywood to The State of the Indian Screenplay and a student competition presented by Cell Phone Cinema Professor Karl Bardosh.

Film Festival Traveler caught up with MIAAC Festival director L. Somi Roy for a briefing.   

Q: What does this year’s festival say about current trends in Indian filmmaking?

SR: It has no accent. In the past you had a lot of immigrant filmmakers, but now we have an Indian-American cinema that sounds homegrown. The filmmakers in their 20s and early 30s were born here. Their parents came as engineers and doctors, under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It was a big brain drain, much to the chagrin of their own parents, who grieved, “Is that why we gave them an education, for them to leave?”

Now the American-born children of those professionals are coming into maturity and occupying important roles in society and culture. They’re starting companies and making movies. And many of them have a sense of their culture and heritage. So was that such a brain drain after all?

Q: So now a generation later they’re coming back to the fold.

SR: Yes, and they’re speaking as Americans, with a new interpretation of what it means to be a global Indian. This is what our festival is ultimately about.

Q: How does that translate onscreen?

SR: There’s a sense of pioneership. For instance, one young filmmaker is coming to the Indian school of filmmaking through Snoop Dogg.

Q: If it’s possible to generalize from a cinema as varied as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and other regional strands, how would you describe the basic vocabulary of Indian cinema?

SR: It tends to telescope content with a certain poetry and lyricism -- and emotiveness. We have a certain amount of idioms of genre, like the song and dance sequences associated with Bollywood.

Q: Will Indian song and dance cross over like, say salsa?

SR: What makes a billion people plus respond at some visceral level? Now Indian film still seems alien to us, but this will change. Just as Hong Kong martial arts cinema entered the American film language – think The Matrix – so too American film language will be Indianized. But Bollywood is too localized. It’s just one quarter of the Indian film industry, and most years it’s not even the largest segment. What we’ll see more and more is that narrative conventions are going to cross over, and cultural myths are going to be incorporated into the film idiom. We’ve already seen this historically.

Q: What’s an example?

SR: It took an Indian filmmaker to make a song-and-dance sequence a strategic device to advance a plot. The great Tamil Nadu filmmaker S.S. Vasan was the first guy to use song and dance for the purpose of story. Until Chandralkha, which he did in 1948, musicals were just song and dance sequences. What Indian song and dance did was to make the Busby Berkeley sequence serve a narrative function. That was the beginning of the crossover of cinematic language.

Q: What’s the magic formula for Indian productions targeting US distribution?

SR: The short answer is, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. I put together the FILMINDIA industry panels because I wanted to know, myself. So I rounded up people from different backgrounds: talent agents, tax advisors, media executives, accounting professionals from KMPG and people with legal backgrounds. The whole purpose of doing these panels was that it’s a space we need to provide for. Those were the first panels of their kind.

Q: In wooing American audiences, should Indian films embrace the spectacle and melodrama they’re broadly associated with, or adopt a more Western aesthetic and narrative?

SR: The second panel of the day was called Success Stories and Changing Formulas, but the whole conversation that led to that particular panel was something I was talking about with (William Morris/Endeavor agents) David Taghioff and Suchir Batra for a long time.

When I first started speaking to William Morris, in October 2008, we hadn’t yet premiered Slumdog Millionaire. That happened November 8th [2008]. Flash forward to January, when Warner Bros released Chandni Chowk to China. It was obviously a film that had been produced before the success of Slumdog. It became old formula by the time it hit the screen. What Slumdog proved was the opposite approach.

Sony, Fox and Disney had all opened studios in Bombay, and the basic strategy was to produce films using Indian producers to capture part of the Indian market. They weren’t making films to capture the global market. But by the time Chandni opened you could make a subtitled film with Indian content that could capture a big global market. So now the whole mantra for Indian producers and everyone is, we got to think all this afresh.

Q: What are the caveats?

SR: Just because it’s of a particular genre doesn’t mean it will be good. It’s not enough to plug in a formula.

Q: So you’d agree with New York writer/director Sri Rao, who advised aspiring filmmakers in the FILMINDIA audience to create stories they’re passionate about and not get bogged down in stylistics?

SR: Sri is right. Look at Slumdog Millionaire and The Darjeeling Limited. No one would consider Darjeeling an Indian film in the way that Slumdog is. I was in India in January 2009, and everyone was saying, “How come it took British Danny Boyle to make a great Indian film?”

The emotional placement is with the Indian character. You worry, you’re scared for, you exult with an Indian character. That’s what makes an Indian film, not three spoiled middle class characters rambling though the Indian landscape. Darjeeling took pomo to a new level. No one was sympathetic, just snide and distancing and snarky. People didn’t relate to that. So just having an Indian landscape doesn’t make it identifiably Indian.

Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge has the conventions of Bollywood written all over it. Or take Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers, by Russ Meyer. It’s an action-exploitation film with large-breasted women, but it’s Bollywood in spirit in the sense that the melodrama is overstated, very situational and plot driven and less motivational.  

Q: Are you a fan of Bollywood cinema?

SR: Now it’s become a guilty pleasure, an addiction. Even someone like me, a Tibeto-Burman from Manipur on the Burmese border, can follow a Hindi film – or what you would call Hindi film, even though it’s not Hindi, but rather Hindustan, which is a mixture of Hindi and Urdu. The reach has to be as wide as possible. So the plot lines are fairly recognizable, the story is predictable, the music provides the emotional anchoring and the dance provides the joy and visual pleasure of watching a popular Hindi film.

What makes it popular is precisely the fulfillment of expectations. The villain who is twirling his mustache is about to rape the hero’s sister, and at that moment you hear the musical cue and you know the villain is going to come barging through the door. But the catharsis is in the deliverance of that fright, and that fright comes just when you want it. You crawl into each other’s arms, and that’s when you enjoy it. It’s not that different from a slasher movie. The telephone rings; you know that the murderer is behind her. That’s not unique to Indian film, but to popular entertainment.

Q: So is outsized drama, perhaps more than song and dance, the secret to Bollywood’s success with mainstream U.S. viewers?

SR: A friend of mine from Kentucky said he wept uncontrollably with his roommate watching a Bollywood film on television. When I asked him which one, he said, “Oh, I don’t know, we just wept and wept.”

Maybe the future appeal of the popular Indian film might in the three-hanky film, the melodrama. Bollywood will not have the action virtuosity of the Hong Kong film, but in terms of emotional placement – you know, the woman who decides to throw herself in the lake so that she can be reunited with her lover who has been forbidden to her in this life -- we enjoy that moment.

Q: To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the emotion, stupid.”

SR: I don’t want to make fun of it and simply say that an emotional response is all a popular film is about. We just showed Well Done Abba. (Director) Shyam Benegal uses song and dance conventions, but in his own way, because he’s a film artist and not just a hack. The female character has a fantasy of a boy and a girl flying over her village -- it’s ridiculous! -- and the second song sequence is of a woman in the back of a truck. Both sequences have the familiarity of the genre, but it has been interpreted by an artist. It was wonderfully received.

Q: So the kinetics stay.

SR: One of India's leading film critics, Chidananda Das Gupta, says the importance of song and dance routines is that they give a place for your eyes and ears to rest. So Hindi cinema’s contribution to Western culture may be in its use of song and dance to grab the viewer emotionally, like Alan Jay Lerner put song and dance into My Fair Lady.

Q: Looking ahead to the next three-to-five years, what are your goals for MIAAC?

SR: When I first came to MIAAC last year, I came with a few stated objectives. One of them was to expand beyond a Desi audience to a more mainstream audience. MIAAC speaks to both a New York/U.S. audience and to an Indian audience. I want the festival to represent what the two cultures are going to be three-to-five years from now.

This is where programming comes in. If we are able to frame and present Indian cinema with the kind of characters and conventions we have, we should be able to shape people’s perceptions. But not by putting Bollywood films together with Satyajit Ray. It’s not just about presenting the best of the culture.

The films will reflect their own culture and politics and history and nation. High art by definition can travel across cultures very easily. It’s the culture that has your own clothes that’s more of a challenge.

Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival
Nov. 11th - 15th, 2009

The Indo-American Arts Council
517 East 87th St, Suite 1B
New York, NY 10128
Phone: 212 594 3685
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Web: www.iaac.us

Opening Night Screening:
Paris Theatre
4West 58th St., New York 10019

Opening Night Gala Benefit Screening & Dinner
Metropolitan Club
1East 60th Street

General Screenings
The Quad Cinema
34 West 13th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues

Closing Night
Walter Reade Theatre
Lincoln Center
165 W 65th St.

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