NFDC presence at film fete marginal

Little is known about its much awaited feature film Ambedhkar directed by Jabbar Patel and featuring Mammooty in the lead role. The NFDC organised a big bash at the Trivandrum IFFI a couple of years ago and announced the project. Two years have passed, but the NFDC officials are not able to say when the film will be premiered. And nobody has seen Jabbar Patel in the festival.

The most shocking aspect of the NFDC’s functioning is that there is no full time managing director and the last incumbent, the popular Ravi Gupta, quit in March last year and the Ministry has not been able to find a suitable person to replace him.Right now, the executive director of the NFDC is holding additional charge.

The last time the NFDC ever had a board of directors was six years ago when D V S Raju was the chairman. The full board, when constituted, will have a strength of 15 members, but now it has only five official members, including the Executive Director. Since no minister continues in the Information Ministry for more than an year (Pramod Mahajan himself admitted it during the inauguration of the Indian panorama section of this IFFI here) no one has time to appoint a non-official board of directors.

"All the work is going on as per schedule even though there is no board," says executive director Krishnamurthy. "We recently had the annual general body meeting and took stock of the working of the various wings of the corporation," he adds.

Apart form giving loans to the film-makers to the tune of Rs 35 lakh per film, if the script is cleared by a screening panel, the NFDC also offers to become co-producer. "But there is onecondition; all the money that the producer is spending has to be routed through the corporation", says an official.

Not many film makers are attracted by this idea. The regular film makers like Girish Kasaravali, B Narasing Rao, Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and many others have not approached the NFDC in the recent years with any proposal. For example, the three feature films in the panorama made with NFDC support are Chalo America by Piyush Shah, Mangamma by T V Chandran and Shaheed-E-Mohabbat Boota Singh by Manoj Punj. This shows a 50 per cent decline, as last year there were 6 NFDC financed films in the panorama section.

A Telugu film Thodu, co-produced by Doordarshan and the NFDC last year won six state awards but failed to qualify for Panorama screening. Why many serious film makers have deserted the NFDC is a million dollar question.

Another important function of the NFDC, after the Directorate of Film Festivals took over the organisation of the festivals, wasputting up the Film Market section which offered the forum for Indian and foreign film makers to market their films. This film market was a big draw until a few years ago with many state governments, including the Andhra Pradesh State Film Development Corporation, participating.

But, in this festival, the India Trade Promotion Organisation (ITPO) is organising a fair in which NFDC has just one stall!

An interesting project started a few years ago was the marketing of classic films in video format. The Ray trilogy and about half a dozen other films were brought out on video tapes and they were good collectors’ items. But, this was stopped for reasons unknown, six years ago and there does not seem to be any attempt to revive it.

According to one of the NFDC deputy director, the project has not been given up and film buffs can look forward to having at least 50 classics from the Indian cinema in video tape form. "We are trying to get good quality tape and flawless subtitling but the video tapes are likelyto be expensive. Still we are confident we will be able to give all the classics in about three months’ time from now, he says.

The NFDC claims `it is the only major producer of meaningful Indian films of outstanding quality…and its mission is planning and promoting an integrated and efficient development of the film industry’.