THE SHORTER WAY FORWARD
WHILE ONE INDIAN SHORT FILM HAS ITS SIGHTS SET ON AN OSCAR, OTHERS ARE BEGINNING TO FIND NEWER AUDIENCES
AAbhiroop Basu recently woke up to the news that his short film, Meal (2018), would soon be travelling to Denmark. The only Indian entry to be selected for the 2019 Odense International Film Festival (OFF), Meal stands a chance of qualifying for the Oscars if it wins in its category. Before the 11-minute Meal won top prize at the 9th Dadasaheb Phalke International Film Festival,
two of Basu’s shorts—Afternoon with Julia (2016) and The Paper Man (2017)— were screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Surprisingly, Basu is only 25.
As Indian filmmakers have started to experiment with the short film format, the format itself allows them to be more experimental. Meal, for instance, has no dialogues. Actors Ratnabali Bhattacharjee and Adil Hussain don’t speak to each other. It’s the bruises on Bhattacharjee’s face that do the talking. “All around us today, people have become very nonchalant and unemotional. It says a lot about where we’re headed—a state of lovelessness. That’s what Meal is about,” says Basu.
In India, especially, short films are often considered a stepping stone for directors who have their eyes on feature-length films. Never looked at as a standalone entity, shorts have not been particularly profitable. There is, however, some cause for hope. With Netflix and other online platforms now streaming shorts, many filmmakers have begun to argue that times might be changing.
Humaramovie, which has produced approximately 400 short films since its inception in 2012, is among a handful of online platforms—Pocket Films, YouTube, Terribly Tiny Tales, Large Short Films and Hotstar—trying to promote the genre in India. Humaramovie, which also doubles up as a studio and incubator lab, had kicked off its short film foray with a film called Adrak (2012), directed by Sahirr Sethhi, a first-timer who had just passed out of FTII. Associate producer Abhishek Gautam says that when he started, only people from film schools talked about short films. Today, Gautam has worked with
close to 200 filmmakers. “From a content creators’ perspective, it really is heartening to see everyone take to short films with such enthusiasm,” he says.
With newer audiences demanding films of a smaller length, multiplex chains such as PVR have even started picking up shorts to screen in their theatres, and several film festivals are setting aside time to accommodate them. The popularity of short films is also in no way limited to the metros. The Expressions Short Film Festival, for instance, is held in Nagpur. When you add to this the digital explosion, the options for filmmakers increase exponentially. “The flip side is that it leaves the short filmmaker confused as to how best to release the film,” admits Mumbai-based director Vikas Chandra.
While Chandra’s short Maya (2018) won its protagonist a Filmfare award this year, Jyoti Kapur Das’ Chutney (2016) got more than 113 million views after winning big at The Filmfare awards in 2017. Chandra says, “Veterans like Sudhir Mishra, Sujoy Ghosh and Anurag Kashyap are making shorts. Filmfare has started a section to award them. All this shows the format has finally come of age.”
Shooting his next short in Shillong, Basu does sound a word of caution. He says that now anyone with a DSLR camera and access to a YouTube tutorial feels they can make a short film. “But would you let a hardcore gamer who can fly jets in a video game, fly an actual aircraft? That’s what is happening with 80 per cent of shorts,” he says. Abhishek Gautam, too, is concerned about shorts that forsake quality in their hope of going viral. “We must focus on what made short films successful. They were a device of telling stories which otherwise weren’t getting told,” he says.