If You Can’t Go to Them, Regional Cinema From the Northeast Will Come to You

While growing up in Guwahati, Manas Pratim Kalita couldn’t watch most of the latest Assamese films. It had nothing to do with his exhaustive engineering course. “There are hardly any movie theatres!” says the 25-year-old, “We missed a lot of good films because of this shortage.” The sentiment is acute, with the recent burst of regional films from the Northeast doing really well in the international festival circuits, such as Rima Das’s Village Rockstars (2017). But film-goers in Assam—especially the younger generation—feel the pinch more especially because of the rich tradition of filmmaking in the state that goes back to 1935 with Joymoti, directed by noted Assamese writer, poet and filmmaker Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, which is considered as the departure point for modern Assamese cinema. The film, ironically, was released in Kolkata since there were no halls in Assam.

While Assam has been going through what filmmakers and critics call a “reverse trend”—where the state’s theatre industry has been witnessing a boom—alternate spaces for cinema have come into the picture in a big way to fill the gaping holes in the region. And this is where initiatives such as Kalita’s Movietonne—which was launched this year on August 18—comes in. It’s an acknowledgment of a loss and an attempt to bridge the existing gaps. It’s a streaming site for Assamese films (22 Assamese films, as of now) that has set a remarkable example in terms of reach (“We have had over 10,000 views since our launch,” says Kalita) and accessibility (not more that ₹40 per movie). “We looked at platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime and knew that we wanted to provide an online movie streaming platform to display our own regional stories,” says Kalita who is working on expanding his platform to cover documentaries and shorts, apart from films from Manipur and Meghalaya, “If someone like me, who lives in a big city like Guwahati, has issues, imagine someone who resides in remote corners of the region.”

The New Wave

Movietonne—which will also start a forum for the film industry in the Northeast and crowdfunding for homegrown films—is the most recent addition to the spate of alternative mediums of cinema viewing, adding to the miniscule representation on popular streaming sites such as Netflix (Pradip Kurbah’s Onaatah) and YouTube. There have been agencies such as the Children’s Film Society India (CFSI) that have a screening model allowing the film to travel across the country. Utpal Borpujari, filmmaker and critic behind the National Award-winning Ishu, credits the CFSI with taking his film across the country to a younger audience. “[But] it's also important that my film gets released in theatres in Assam, considering that it has received a very positive response from audiences during its two special screenings in Assam at film festivals till now,” he says.

Over the last six-odd years, travelling cinema initiatives such as Aaideo Talkies have added to the work of disseminating stories from the region. “[It’s] an experiment that was started around six years ago by a group of young people. The latest model of travelling cinema halls have satellite projection systems, 5.1 sound quality and even air-conditioning, thus enabling the viewer in even a remote location without access to an actual cinema hall to experience a city cinema hall-like experience to some extent,” says Borpujari, “My effort would be to get Ishu released via such a travelling cinema hall, as I firmly believe that the real audience of Assamese films lies in the rural and semi-urban places. One good thing is that in the last couple of years, a few films have been able to bring audiences back to theatres to some extent. Which is a good sign—but then, it's still a long way to go as far as local cinema becoming really commercially viable is concerned.”

It’s clear that the definitive way to move ahead is to bring cinema to you if you can’t go to them.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

This change in the way films from the region are being viewed has got to do with the shift in the pace and methodology of filmmaking in the Northeast, and more visibly in Assam. “In the last five years, there has been a veritable explosion of content-rich cinema coming out of Assam, and considering the conditions under which filmmaking is practiced in the state, each of these filmmakers serves as an inspiration to all of us,” says filmmaker Bhaskar Hazarika, whose Assamese film Kothanodi (starring Seema Biswas and Adil Hussain) won the Best Feature Film in Assamese in the National Film Awards in 2016, “The global success of Village Rockstars in particular has been a tremendous boost. The guerrilla approach to filmmaking that Rima Das adopted is eminently replicable in budget-starved film communities. So overall, it’s an exciting time to be making films in Assam.”

Regional content in the existing cinema halls, though marred by limited screenings, is still a potential filmmakers are not ready to discount yet. “Content over the years has changed, with the arrival of VHS and tape. And now finally the DSLR and the mobile phone, filmmaking is more accessible to the local filmmaker. Some of these films were quite interesting but because they were screened in halls where the main motive is profit-driven, they weren't commercially successful. Still, the content is interesting to examine. I firmly believe that a new model has to be created where the end result is not just mere profit for the hall owners. This way, the market forces and commercial return will not determine the kind of films being generated, otherwise the local filmmaker is compelled to create content that will only fill up halls,” says Khasi filmmaker Wanphrang Diengdoh.

Another contributing factor is also the fact that many filmmakers prefer to work in Mumbai in order to keep up with the changing form of cinema across the world. “In my view, the Northeast in general, and Assam in particular, has been unable to keep pace with the changing aesthetics of cinema worldwide. The distance between a filmmaker in Bombay and one in Assam is more than physical. Therefore, working outside Assam can be a great advantage to acquaint oneself with the trends and ideas informing 21st century filmmaking. Thankfully, this is precisely what is happening as the new crop of films from Assam are all being mounted by filmmakers who have worked in film industries in Bombay and elsewhere, or have formally studied filmmaking in institutions of repute. It also helps that we now have the excellent Dr Bhupen Hazarika Regional Government Film and Television Institute in Guwahati, which is at the forefront of cinema education in the Northeast, and is churning out some amazing talent,” adds Hazarika

There is still a lot of work to be done, especially when it comes to filmmakers who have brought their dialects on to contemporary celluloid for the first time. Accessibility, in their case, is a difficult terrain to traverse in ways more than one. “Filming in a dialect [Sherdukpen] that has hardly 4,000 speakers brings with it its own set of limitations,” says filmmaker Sange Dorjee Thongdok from Arunachal Pradesh, “I cannot depend on my small community to carry a film and have to rely on an audience that is willing to put up with subtitles. This greatly limits the audience for my films on top of the fact that there is hardly any audience as it is for independent cinema.”

However, staying in the Northeast still remains the vantage point for storytellers in terms of authenticity, experimentation and, more importantly, a rootedness that is typical of regional cinema worldwide. “I grew up surrounded by oral storytellers in my village—my grandfather, my uncle and some of the old woman that I was close to,” says Dominic Sangma, who brought Garo language to our screens for the first time. “Rong'kuchak (2016) was my tribute to those storytellers that I grew up with. I grew up watching Hindi films until I joined a film school. I thought that one day, I will go to Bombay and make good Hindi films. But the film institute completely transformed me and made me realise what I can do with cinema. Cinema is beyond Hindi films. What I have back home is priceless.”