It was Cannes 2022 with a slight difference. A Goan short film called Wagro was screened at the festival. This is in keeping with the general trend in the Konkani film industry. Movies from the State have won awards nationally. Actors from the state have starred in movies that generated interest around the country. The presence of talent is obvious, and there is no doubt. The film industry in the State has struggled to sustain itself. Now, with the industry moving ahead in the post-Covid world, what is the situation on the ground? Are movies being planned and are shoots taking place.
Rajendra Talak said short films were being made but feature films were not being planned because big films needed big money. He said “Now that the committee has been set, things will start moving on the ground. Mumbai has started moving and in another six months, Goa will start moving too. Making a feature film is big money. Anyone who makes such movies in Goa is doing it for the love of his State, the language, and filmmaking because films don’t generate money here. It is a loss-making exercise. Look at the film industry in Maharashtra, they make around a
hundred and fifty films a year but only ten make a profit. They have channels there that buy movies and they are able to recover the cost but here in Goa, where are the channels. Here there is no one who advertises on a large scale which can help anyone interested in buying the movies earn money while screening them.” He said in Goa the government gave the money which meant they had their own pace of working and all the paperwork had to be in place to get the subsidies from the authorities. He said he expected a couple of movies to be released this year with his movie set to be released next year.
Severino, another producer of movies in Konkani, said the audience for these movies preferred watching tiatrs. He said “Marathi and Hindi movies can be re-released in different markets and they will generate funds. That is not the case with Konkani films. And yes, the cost of screening them in places like Kala Academy is high with fifty percent of your revenue going to pay the cost. I invested ninety-eight lakhs in a movie and was able to get only thirty percent back because I could only have two shows and then Covid struck. I could not screen the movie in places like Mangalore, Dubai, and the UK. The situation is so bad that in order to get some money back, we should not invest much”.
Rajesh Pednekar short film which was screened at Cannes said a lot of short films were happening. Wagro is a short film that was awarded a national prize and then went to Cannes and came out from one of the several short films made. Speaking about movies on a bigger platform, he said it was not happening. He said it was not financially viable. He however said new directorial ventures were taking off. And speaking about his plans he said wanted to make a film for an international audience but would still strike a chord with Goans. While in Cannes, he announced his next project called ‘Yet another Mohenjodaro’. The one hundred and thirty-minute documentary is about a civilization that flourished around the cotton mills in Mumbai. In the 1850s, a civilization flourished around the cotton mills in
Mumbai. This civilization was known as ‘Girangaon’ – ‘the Abode of Mills’, an offspring of the industrial revolution. And then in 1982, a strike of millworkers marked the total devastation of Girangaon! The mill worker is nowhere to be seen since! Vanished in thin air! Girangaon ceased to exist. Girangao is ‘Yet another Mohenjo daro’.
Tapan Acharya is an actor who has worked in Hindi, Marathi, and Konkani cinema. Speaking about the Konkani film industry, he said “ We need to understand the audience is evolving. Their taste is changing. It is going in different directions. There is a twenty-five-lakh strong market for Konkani films. The diaspora is all over the world in places as different as Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, London, and Canada. But logistically, the digital platform cannot tap the market. You have to understand there are thirty dialects in which Konkani can be written. The audience wants it in the script they are comfortable in and they are not willing to adapt. They will just not watch it. They will complain they don’t understand it. The Konkani film industry has made some great cinema in the past but asks them if they ever broke even. People spend fifty thousand and expect to make a good film but if you want good quality, you should be willing to spend over a crore but then that will reduce the possibility of profits.”
The industry is certainly caught in a bind and will have to find a way to reach its targeted audience. Not being able to see stories that are their own could leave a mark on Goan culture.
