CANNES, May 25:
The hub of art and glamour in the world of cinema got a taste of the Indian underground cinema when the country’s only entry in the main draw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival was screened.
‘Miss Lovely’, directed by Ashim Ahluwalia, was screened in the Un Certain Regard section on Thursday morning. The film is the only Indian movie in the main official selection esides ‘Kalpana’ by Uday Shankar in the other official Cannes Classics section.
The parallel Critics Week and Directors Fortnight are screening two other independent films from India.
‘Miss Lovely’ is the story of Bollywood’s C grade film industry of the 70s and the 80s, which catered to small town cinemas that inserted their one reel of porn in between the screening of the film to draw the crowds.
Talking about the film, director Ahluwalia told UNI, ‘It is a project which took several years to complete. It is not a Bollywood film. It is a Mumbai-centric Hindi cinema.’
The idea for ‘Miss Lovely’ came from a documentary Ahluwalia wanted to make about the underbelly of Bollywood. The documentary about the C grade industry never worked out, but the idea stayed with the him.
‘Nobody wanted to be on camera because C grade film industry is illegal,’ Ahluwalia said. ‘I kept the story with me for ten years before finally I started the project,’ he added.
While doing the research for his documentary, Ahluwalia saw the C grade filmmakers creating a feature film in ‘four days flat.’
‘They shot in a flat in Andheri. They laid out grass on its floor for an outdoor shooting. They took away the grass and it became an indoor shoot,’ he said.
‘It was incredible. I admired that kind of energy. It was a fascinating aspect of the industry,’ he added.
The filmmaker felt a ‘kind of affinity’ with the underground filmmakers, not for the films they made, ‘which are awful.’ But they needed to be commended for their ‘independent spirit.’
Ahulawalia explores the period of the end of socialism in India and the beginning of globalisation, a time that also marked the beginning of the end of the C grade industry. The advent of the internet and easy availability of online porn saw its demise.
According to the director, the C grade industry started collapsing in the new millennium when a lot of technicians started to leave for the fast growing Bhojpuri film industry.
‘The braver ones started shooting porn because there is a huge sub-culture of porn now. A lot of the others are unemployed, many retired,’ he added.
‘Miss Lovely’ was under the eyes of the Cannes festival, which knew Ahluwalia’s talent in exploring the depth of a subject through his national award-winning film ‘John and Jane’ about the Indian call centre industry. (UNI)
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