Net Working

Filmmaker Onirbhan Dhar,better known as Onir,is lounging on a Kashmiri carpet at his den at Hauz Khas,sipping on a lemon juice and giving a sneak preview of his new film,tentatively titled I Am.

Filmmaker Onirbhan Dhar,better known as Onir,is lounging on a Kashmiri carpet at his den at Hauz Khas,sipping on a lemon juice and giving a sneak preview of his new film,tentatively titled I Am. He has woven together four stories from four parts of the country Kolkata,Bangalore,Srinagar and Mumbai and has brought in filmmakers like Anurag Basu and Anurag Kashyap to act alongside Nandita Das,Juhi Chawla,Sanjay Suri and Manisha Koirala. But even more interesting is how the funds were raised mostly from Facebook friends.

On Facebook,I asked people to invest in the project, says Onir. The terms were these: if you pay over Rs 1 lakh,you will be acknowledged in the beginning of the film and given a proportionate share in the profits; if you pay Rs 25,000-1 lakh,your contribution will be returned after (and if) they recover the cost of print; if you pay Rs 5,000- 25,000 you will be acknowledged in end credits and on the website; if you pay Rs 1,000-5,000,you will be merely acknowledged on Facebook and the DVD booklet. Onir claims he has raised Rs 85 lakh like this.

This experiment is a first for a commercial film in India. We are not only raising money,but also creating an audience base who will watch the film because they have a stake in its making, says Onir,who settled for 400 entries out of a selected 4,000 applications from 35 countries which,he says,he received in just one and half months. By May 15 last year,we posted the link to our first story with a call for funds and by July we commenced shooting, he says.

This is the second project of Onir and Suri under their banner,Anticlock Films. The first was Sorry Bhai that flopped. This time,Onir,Suri and their Facebook friends will be hoping for better luck. Each story in the quartet Afia about a woman longing to be a mother,Abhimanyu about an abused child,Megha about a Kashmiri Pandit who returns to her home town Srinagar and Omar about a gigolo in Mumbai who is harassed by the police is 20 minutes long. These are about the conflicts and dilemmas of modern India,about people from marginalised sections of the community who continue dreaming and living fractured lives, says Onir. Facebook fans will definitely be watching.

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