‘What does it take to make a movie?’… Gone are the days when such a question caught awe-filled eyes gazing at an aspiring film-maker eager to learn about the art and science of making motion pictures. It might rather end up making you a butt of joke amongst a bunch kids fluttering around you, teaching you to make a movie using a device as handy as a cell phone. That’s what it may take to make a movie in the present day.
In a metropolis like Mumbai, with an ample of amateur and cheaper film-suite gadgets pouring into the market every day, making a movie, in its most basic sense, has become a layman’s task. One may find a number of folks optimizing this opportunity. Corresponding to the plethora of amateur film-makers passionate about the voraciously popular medium, the city witnesses a number of film festivals providing them a platform to display their flair. A mass amongst these to-be-successful film-makers usually treats the platform offered by film festivals as testing grounds. It is their opportunity to get well versed with the medium and unlock the gates to the mainstream cinema broadly termed as Bollywood.
Not talking about what happens to it in the future, young film-makers’ creative notions resulting from a die-hard experimentation motivated by the desire to outstand their competition, surely heat up the airs of film festivals. Substantially, due to financial limitations, the fantastic ideas of these budding film-makers rarely tend to get a life on the reel. Their imaginations are bound to consider this. May be, this is why the amateur cinema in and around a place like Mumbai has to deal with the issues of real life characters. Mumbai film festival’s short film competition, Dimensions Mumbai, demands its participants to make films depicting aspects of life in the city.
Film festivals flocked by young and motivated film-makers is one of the few platforms that voices the cries of real life characters who make their lives in most