At FTII, cinema has many languages. Nurture them

In an institute devoted to teaching young people the craft of visual storytelling, here are some numbers that tell their own story. In 2023, of a batch of 10 student diploma films, only one was made entirely in Hindi. Three were in Marathi; one each in Malayalam, Gujarati, Haryanvi and Santali; one brought together English, Marathi and Hindi; another braided English and Hindi with Mizo and Nagamese. Taken together, these films form a chorus of many tongues finding their way to the screen.

As a report in this newspaper shows, this is part of a deeper, two-decade-long shift at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. At one of the country’s most prestigious filmmaking schools, students are beginning to trust the textures of their own languages, to draw from the sounds and rhythms that shaped them and tell their own unique stories. In doing so, they offer a reminder of what creative resilience looks like at a moment when Indian cinema — across regions and industries — appears increasingly formulaic. This fresh efflorescence, like the parallel cinema movement of the 1950s-70s and the indie surge of the early 2000s, holds the promise of renewal: Of cinema rediscovering relevance by widening, rather than narrowing, its field of vision.

Advertisement

This moment acquires added significance amid renewed state enthusiasm for India’s “orange” or creative economy, a theme foregrounded at last month’s 56th International Film Festival of India. The multilingual flowering of student cinema offers a gentler, but more enduring, lesson in cultural value. It reminds us why spaces like FTII must be protected from homogenisation and cultural thinning: Because institutions that allow young filmmakers to wander freely across language, form and voice do more than produce skilled professionals — they keep alive the plural imagination on which India’s creative future rests.