Editorial

Busy week for busy bodies
IT’s been a ‘happening’ week, this last one. And not just for the Channel (V) team that’s been booked for getting two girls to strip down to their gym briefs on Mumbai’s busy Linking Road.
Amazing, that worse things happen on Mumbai’s streets, from carnage to loot and shoot-outs that get buried in the inside pages of newspapers. Yet, here was a cheap, low-brow fare designed to grab eyeballs and ruffle feathers, which has done just that. And suddenly, everyone from ministers to busy body women activists and NGOs you haven’t heard of from Adam, are crying themselves hoarse with unsolicited soundbytes on the ‘commodification’ of women, obscenity and the like.

Which begs the question: Where were the ministers, NGOs and muck-rakers when a woman was doused with kerosene and set on fire on Mumbai’s streets this very same week? None of them has had anything to say on what, by any yardstick, was a worse crime, don’t you think?

Corporation for corruption
NOW to move on. For those in showbiz, there’s been a lot happening that should interest them. Such as the SCREEN ‘scoop’ on the government’s bid to privatise the NFDC, FTII and DFFI, for instance. So what does the bid really hold for our filmfolk?

Well, we’d better get our onions right, before we clamour for privatisation. Divestment’s become fashionable with the government, and a yuppie credo for the many business journals that crowd the newsstands. But surely, what’s good for one PSU need not be right for other government outfits.

Will privatisation solve the problems, of which there are plenty at the NFDC. The very mention of NFDC now spells ennui for some in the industry. Indeed, the general feeling among filmfolk, if you ask them in private, is that the corporation has long since outlived its utility. That it has now become just another front for corruption-ridden babudom to ‘mint’ money, while the industry, for which it was created continues to languish in its worst ever financial crunch.

Well, has the NFDC really outlived its purpose? Created as it was, with the express intention of funding meaningful cinema in the country, the NFDC has been associated with some of our best films to date. Its track record, at least in the initial years, has been impressive. Which only goes to show that such an extreme step as privatisation is hardly necessary to revive the corporation.

All that’s required is a leadership with vision, focussed on the development of meaningful, middle-of-the-road cinema, and a good, clean administration, comprising filmfolk themselves, instead of the babus.

A question of viability
PRIVATISATION may help solve the problem of resource crunch. But the kind of films a privatised NFDC will fund is what worries us. Private entities are more apt to look for top-bracket commercial viability. And chances are, they may do nothing to further the cause of meaningful cinema.

Time was, when the likes of Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani and Mrinal Sen depended entirely on the NFDC for funds. Some of our best films ever came about thanks to the association. Now, however, the NFDC has stopped financing such ventures under the pretext that they are no longer financially viable.

Aren’t they? The problem isn’t that the NFDC has been hell-bent on profits on its productions. After all, which production outfit isn’t? Other producers of low-budget, yet tasteful cinema, may have far meagre resources to work with in comparison. Yet, they have shown that a market for their brand of cinema certainly exists. If marketed intelligently and adequately enough, their films, too, can be commercially viable.

Unfortunately, that’s something the NFDC has never bothered to do in the past.

Being a government body, the NFDC also has a pact with Doordarshan’s national network, a luxury other production houses of low-budget fare don’t enjoy. Yet, here too, its films have been so poorly marketed that it now owes DD as much as Rs 20 crore. The NFDC has also eaten humble pie in all of its other dealings, such as the sub-titling unit, theatre financing, distribution of foreign films, film exports and running a film society.

The only hope for the NFDC after privatisation, is perhaps, if the filmfolk themselves acquire it. Don’t forget that when the government set up the Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation (IMPEC, along with the Film Finance Corporation, was later merged with the NFDC) in the early 60s, some filmfolk did buy up its shares. Similarly, it’s quite likely that they will be keen to acquire the NFDC, too.

But will the film industry be able to beat other bidders, should the NFDC go on the blocks? The odds are, of course, stacked heavily against it.

Shaju George Alex