When I was a kid, there was only one film festival in India ufffd the International Film Festival of India, or IFFI. It took place in Delhi every other year and in the in-between years it travelled to different cities and towns in the country: Calcutta, Trivandrum, Cuttack. A committed group of cinephiles followed it wherever it went in the country, because this was the one chance to access excellent cinema from the world ufffd though for many it was also the chance to access erotica of sorts via the more sexually frank scenes in arthouse movies.

Times have changed ufffd you can access the most obscure films on the Internet. A phone call will summon a pirated DVD seller who will fan films from all over the world like a tarot card reading upon your kitchen table.


Illustration/ Jishu Dev Malakar

Interestingly, the number of film festivals in India has grown by the score. Gorakhpur, Ghaziabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Puri ufffd there are festivals of all sorts everywhere. Trivandrum has a superb festival in December and people take their two weeks of annual leave to coincide with it so they can watch films all day, starting at nine am. The Puri Bring Your Own Film Festival in February has no selection ufffd anyone can come, book a slot and show any film, in tents on the beach.

What draws people to these events when they could sit at home and watch a zillion films at will online? A festival is the ritual celebration of something that's important to human survival (eg, harvest season) or of historic/mythic importance (the birth of a saint or vanquishing of an enemy). So a film or literature or music festival is a celebration of art as something vital to human existence.

The government supported film festivals to create a better cinema culture. And whatever the million problems of the government, this did happen ufffd many who saw great films at these festivals were inspired to make good films themselves and that's why there are so many film festivals in which to showcase them because the mainstream is slow to catch on to how they can market these.u00a0

Back in the day people scorned the idea of the 'festival film.' It was seen as one that regular folks would not enjoy and appeals only to the educated elite. In a back-present of scorn, the festivals did not include 'popular' forms of entertainment, such as films made in the Mumbai film industry. It was so that cinema and film became two warring clans.

It may have been true that you needed a certain exposure to appreciate good cinema ufffd and via festivals over the years, DD late night movies and the Internet today, that exposure is available to more and more people, and definitions and divisions are changing.

Major international festivals have begun to include Bollywood films in their line-ups. The reason for this is that not all arts are related. In part it's a recognition of popular forms, in part a recognition of the spending power of South Asian diasporic audiences ufffd as festivals the world over sell tickets, unlike India, where entry tends to be free.

Bollywood is still a petulant child holding onto the old divisions ufffd if Guzaarish flops then it's art or a festival film. If it had done well, it would have been a reassertion of the power of big-budget Bollywood. The unsaid logic is, we should not make good films, or they will flop. The real change in times will come when these facile divisions between art and enjoyment are dispensed with and there can be a better cinema for all.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with
fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.