“Far from filmi”
Die indische Filmindustrie beschäftigt über eine Viertelmillion Menschen, dennoch sieht man äußerst selten eine Frau hinter der Kamera. APARNA PEDNEKAR spricht mit einer Top-filmproduzentin über ihren Erfolg in einer männerdominierten Branche.
As one of the few female producers to successfully head an Indian film studio, Priti Shahani is a rarity. After more than 24 years in the media and entertainment business, she has worked on over 90 films in various genres and has received many national awards. Her remarkable work has helped to inspire and shape the careers of film-makers not only in India but around the world.
In India, the word filmi is used to describe the music, vocal style and melodrama typical of the country’s popular cinema culture. Indeed, the cinema is almost a religion for its passionate fans, who grow up applauding and whistling at the screen, devouring film magazines and idolizing the stars. Producing up to 2,000 films every year in more than 20 languages, the Indian film industry employs over a quarter of a million people. The county’s largest film-maker is Bollywood, which produces Hindi-language cinema. It’s based in Mumbai, India’s entertainment capital.
Yet in this mega-industry, women are underrepresented. Not only do male actors earn far more than actresses, but behind the camera, producers such as Priti Shahani are still an exception.
An outsider in the film business
Shahani grew up in Colaba, the southernmost tip of the posh port city of Mumbai, on the Arabian Sea. The city changed the anglicized version of its name, Bombay, to Mumbai in 1995. Shahani says
she is a “Bombay person for life”, but “far from filmi”. Her family had nothing to do with the film industry, and she watched only the occasional film on Sundays with her grandparents, on the television set at home.
All this made Shahani an outsider in the close-knit Indian film business. She recalls once travelling to Andheri East – the film suburb of Mumbai – to meet a film director. On hearing that she lived in Colaba, he told her, “You don’t belong in the film industry.”
But this didn’t discourage Shahani, who came armed with determination and a sparkling young career. As a 21-year-old straight out of college, her first job had been in the sales team of the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Far from the chaos of Hindi cinema, the sophisticated Taj group was her finishing school, where she learned how to shape conversations, read clients and sell an entire hospitality experience.
Getting back to basics
Shahani has always been drawn to sunrise industries – new, rapidly growing sectors. A golden opportunity came her way in the early 2000s, when the first breath of corporatization entered Hindi cinema. She went for an interview at Sahara One Motion Pictures, a Hindi general entertainment channel based in New Delhi.
“What sold me in my first interview was that I had to spend a lot of money,” Shahani smiles, referring to the shift from sales to marketing. She threw herself into learning the basics: discussing media plans, working with agencies, watching films, trying to figure out how a trailer is cut and what sells.
The first five years of studio life were an adrenaline rush. Corporate companies only acquired films, without getting involved in the production. “We were buying films as if we were playing poker on a Diwali night.”
During this time, she was also working with the studio that acquired Ghajini (2008), the film that launched Bollywood’s “100 Crore Club” of blockbuster Indian-language films that have made at least a billion Indian rupees. The studios had thought that they would be
able to change the old system of production and distribution established by generations of families in the movie business. But when they began to lose money, they were forced to get involved in the process of film-making itself. Shahani travelled around the country to study how films were distributed, how cinemas were run and how people watched films in small-town India. “It wasn’t easy to break into; it took a while,” she says. These frequent reality checks prepared Shahani for her biggest challenge yet.
Breaking new ground
As president of Junglee Pictures, a studio backed by The Times Group, India’s biggest media house, Shahani put all her experience of numbers-led cinema into developing small-budget films.
It was here that she worked on what she calls the “toughest film of my life”: Talvar (2015), a thriller drama based on an unsolved double-murder case that had rocked India in 2008.
The film changed Shahani’s life. She collaborated closely with the writer and director to adapt the storyline as the real-life case took unexpected turns. She was introduced to the investigating officer – played on-screen by the late Irrfan Khan – and met the murdered teenage girl’s parents at Dasna jail. It was heartbreaking. “The systemic failure experienced by that family was devastating for me,” she recalls.
Talvar was a film genre unlike any other. Instead of keeping to the norm in an industry that loves replicating formulas, she followed it up with small but path-breaking films.
Battling the gender bias
As part of a panel of female studio bosses on an influential Bollywood Youtube channel, Shahani spoke about her early years in male-dominated Bollywood.
“I got a lot of respect, but I was never necessarily the person they wanted to discuss business with. The moment it shifted to business, they would look at my male colleagues. But I don’t think it was meant to undermine me; they were just not used to having women in the business.”
She battled the gender bias by getting better at the business and its legalities. And when she finally began calling the shots, her actions spoke even louder than her words. At Junglee Pictures, she made films that told not just female stories, but also interesting stories. Badhaai Ho (2018) is a comedy about two grown-up sons discovering that their middle-aged mother is pregnant. Raazi (2018) is based on the true story of a female spy from the 1970s. Both Talvar and Raazi were directed by women. Both were smash hits.
The most amazing story
Just before the pandemic struck, Shahani left Junglee Pictures to start her own company. She admits that the lockdown was wonderful for her personally. She and her husband got to spend time with their daughter just before she left for London. Shahani also jumped at the opportunity to pursue hobbies such as mandala painting and yoga. She tries a new fitness regime every decade and is currently exploring aerial yoga.
Her new production company, Tusk Tales, is the result of her lifelong commitment to nurturing diverse stories, regardless of screen size. She has her finger on the pulse of the industry, where digital content is exploding. Shahani is determined to offer writers and directors the kind of flexibility that she knows studios can’t afford.
The name Tusk Tales is inspired by a story from Indian mythology. Two thousand years ago, the poet Veda Vyasa narrated the Mahabharata – the world’s longest epic – to Lord Ganesha, who vowed to write it down non-stop, even if it broke the tusk that he was writing with. Shahani calls it “the most amazing story ever told”. That perseverance shown by Ganesha, the Indian God of great beginnings, is at the root of her vision.