To watch a so called 'parallel cinema' , it takes lots of patience and guts. Patience because some of the movies tend to go on a slow pace and guts because they are deprived of the ‘entertainment’ quotient which audience try to find in commercial cinema. At least in the above mentioned type of cinemas , the makers are not pretentious about their product. They know that the movie is for niche audience or for film festivals. If they are lucky , probably a distributor will market the movie or documentary with the details of the film festival circuits it has covered on its poster and other marketing paraphernalia. But still , these movies are made and there are backers for such products. This itself is a matter of appreciation for the makers as there are people who get involved in such ‘risky’ projects at the cost of their time and family life for the reason , “ They want to tell a story , a different story , a story of emotions , a story of our surroundings , a story of right and wrong and so on…”
The debate still goes on why there are no distributors for such movies in spite of some of them winning the national awards. A movie with international awards easily grabs the eye ball and if the collaboration is with a foreign film production house , gets a release. But not all such movies have a glowing fate. Some of them go back into archives only to surface on DD. Thanks to DD for showing those movies which we as children have cherished on Sunday afternoons .With the advent of many channels , those movies got pushed in the extreme end of our thought process , getting completely eradicated from our memories with the entertainment cinema taking the front stage.
Times changed , People’s thought process changed , Cinema hall changed and Scripts changed and visibility changed. But the age old problem of niche movies not getting cinema halls still instills fear in the mind of the makers. Even if they have brilliant ideas , the fear of not getting a producer and if the movie is made after a producer has green lighted it , the movie not getting a distributor haunts the makers.
For writers with fresh ideas , it is a herculean task even to meet the makers as in some cases , the makers just make the decision based on a single page synopsis without even bothering to discuss with the writers. So many films flop in the entertainment segment in spite of having item numbers , vulgar scenes , double meaning jokes , stupid comedies and above all no chemistry between the lead actors but they get made for reasons that audience loves entertainment cinema and not meaningful cinema as they want to vent out their frustration and don't want to use their mind while watching cinema. Though in the recent few years , things are changing for better with some big names getting in meaningful commercial cinemas , but those are only handful lot and we as an audience have still long way to go.
With movies like Kaasav (Marathi) , Handuk (Assamese) , Lathe Joshi ( Marathi) , When the Woods
There are film societies who bring such cinema to its audience , but its still a long way to go. Hopefully that time comes immediately and a market is created for film makers to work on such projects without fear.
