Casting the net worldwide

Spurred by the Indian film success story at foreign b.o., dream merchants are trying to cultivate a global taste.

Spurred by the phenomenal success of Indian films at foreign box offices, dream merchants are desperately trying to cultivate a global taste. Can they crack it?

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Hoping to appease overseas audience sick of American humour, desperation in all levels of society and racial parochialism, directors and producers ranging from Deepak Nayar, Shekhar Kapur, Aamir Khan, Bobby Bedi, Ismail Merchant to Ghai are trying to create Indian cinema's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Even as Khan and Bedi are counting on The Rising to surpass the success of Lagaan, which bagged an Oscar nomination, Ghai has left no stone unturned to promote his new "international" film Kisna at Cannes Film Festival 2004.

Similarly, Kapur has managed to get Barrie Osborne, the producer of Lord of the Rings and The Matrix to back his futuristic project Paani, based out of Mumbai. Like everybody else in the race, Kapur believes that Paani will be India's Crouching Tiger... but going by his track record of dabbling in many projects simultaneously there is no telling when the film will see the light of the day.

Deepak Nayar who was in India in May for distribution of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, seems to be doing a little better than his contemporaries. His Kintop Pictures that produced Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham, grossed US $100 million worldwide last year. As for the cherry on the top, Disney's Miramax has snapped up the American and Australian rights for the next Kintop-Chadha production, Bride and Prejudice (due for release on October 8).

In business circles, he is known to have surpassed the success of Merchant-Ivory Productions. His global sensibility that help him spot a film that would work in Thailand and London as well, is a quality that Indian film companies have been seeking desperately, say trade observers.

Even films that fail in India are going great guns at foreign box-offices, say analysts, adding traditional countries like Japan are going in for Indian films, specially south Indian languages (Tamil films Muthu and Yajaman grossed about US $3 million each in Japan.

The market is growing beyond the Indians settled abroad who have a collective per capita income of about US $125 billion (which was almost half the GDP of India a few years ago), and a per capita income of US $50,000. The magic is working on unsuspecting new people, the western audiences.

All this carved a whole new trade strategy, the result of which was the value of film exports expected to cross the US $2,765 million mark in the next six years. Indian producers are now looking at exporting films to new markets in regions like New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mauritius, Tanzania, Kenya, Malaysia and Indonesia besides the established markets of the U.S., U.K., U.A.E. and South Africa.

However, foreign production companies and directors of Indian origin, not Indians, made the only truly global Indian films - Bend It Like Beckham and Monsoon Wedding. Clearly, we need to do better than Benny Mathews' Where's The Party, Yaar? that came and was forgotten. Critics say the film is yet another take on ABCD complete with all the clichés.

Nayar says if India wants to plug into the global market the disorganised nature of the business needs to change. He is supported by a recent study conducted by Columbia films for an Indian Film production house that found effective scheduling and organised finances could bring down the cost of making a film by almost eight per cent.

In addition, the family-owned production houses also need to be tightened in market terms, for the industry to be more professionally managed. In any case the films they made managed to gross $2.2 million in the US and more than US $2.7 million in UK.

Former Miss World turned actor Aishwarya Rai, who recently completed shooting for the much-waited international project Bride And Prejudice says India's image in the global world is rising but "Indian films will have to meet international standards to face global competition."

Even veteran director Ghai is getting into the grove. During the Cannes Film Festival, he was quoted as saying that for the first time in his career he had to develop a bound script prior to shooting for his international project Kisna that has English and Hindi versions with Vivek Oberoi and Antonia Bernath.

Hopefully, once Bollywood gets it act together we will be debating on another type of outsourcing - made in India films marketed across the world.