A Recap
Celebrating its 10th edition this year, the annual NFDC Film Bazaar has become a beacon for budding filmmakers from South Asia. The platform has been tirelessly evolving into a one-stop shop that encourages collaboration between South Asian and international film fraternities; a confluence point for screenwriters, filmmakers, sales agents, distributors, film festival programmers and financiers from around the world.
The Changing Face of Indian Independent Cinema
Since its launch in 2007, Film Bazaar has heralded the rise of independent cinema. An array of titles like The Lunchbox (Ritesh Batra), That Girl in Yellow Boot (Anurag Kashyap), LSD (Dibakar Banerjee/Hindi), Manjunath (Sandeep A Varma/Hindi), Deool (Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni/ Marathi), Shanghai (Dibakar Banerjee/Hindi), The Good Road (Ryan Correa/Gujarati), Television (Mostofa Sarwar Farooki/Bangla Bangladesh's submission to the Oscars for Foreign Film Category), Chauranga (Bikas Mishra/Hindi), Ship of Theseus (Anand Gandhi) Arunoday (Partho Sen Gupta/Marathi), Titli (Kanu Behl/Hindi), Court (Chaitanya Tamhane/Marathi), Thithi (Raam Reddy/Kannada), Fandry (Nagraj Manjule/Marathi), Miss Lovely (Ashim Ahluwalia) , Chauthi Koot (Gurvinder Singh/Punjabi), Margarita With A Straw (Sonali Bose/Hindi/English), Lipstick Under My Burkha (Alankrita Shrivastava/Hindi), Dum Laga Ke Haisha ( Sharat Katariya ), Nil Battey Sannata (Ashwini Iyer Tiwari ), Island City (Ruchika Oberoi/Hindi), 28 (from Sri Lanka) amongst others have brought to the world a refreshing new perspective on cinema from the Indian subcontinent.
Besides receiving international acclaim and releases, with premieres at prestigious international film festivals including Cannes, Toronto, Berlin and Venice, many films that began their journey at Film Bazaar have also had commercial releases in India. A veritable milestone for independent cinema, several films have been picked up by renowned Indian and international film studios, such as Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Titli being released by Yash Raj Films, UTV releasing Ship of Theseus (presented by KiranRao) and The Lunchbox (presented by Karan Johar), and Zee releasing the Marathi film Killa.
Interestingly, a lot of the above mentioned path-breaking films that have come out of the Film Bazaar are by debutant filmmakers.
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