India's Films Division, NFAI and DFF are gone. Can the new NFDC support and inspire great cinema?

Cultural behemoths running on government grants since the 1950s have, of late, been getting wake-up calls to pick up slack and generate revenue. (Photo: Photography Maghradze via Pexels)

The Union government’s decision to close the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), Films Division (FD) and the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF, which organised the International Film Festival of India or IFFI) is no thunderbolt.

In December 2020, the Children’s Film Society of India (CSFI), the only South Asian organisation of its kind, committed entirely to developing and producing cinema about and for children, merged with the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).

The CFSI began in 1955, and it produced more than 300 films, a majority of which never got theatrical release. Still, it was the richest Indian repository of film stories about childhood. It was Jawaharlal Nehru’s idea to promote and popularize children’s cinema in newly independent India; and in its last decade, the CFSI hosted the International Children’s Film Festival or The Golden Elephant for several years. There’s dead silence on the merged entity’s plans for children’s content, if at all there are any.

Even earlier—five years ago, exactly, in May 2017—cultural behemoths running on government grants since the 1950s, some out of marvellous architectural edifices and prime real estate in Delhi and Mumbai—received a wake-up call from the finance ministry: “Generate your own revenue, 25-30% of your budget to begin with, until complete self-sufficiency.”

On paper, it is an excellent remedy for the collective stupor over which the ministry of culture presides. For, over the years, private initiatives and individuals have propelled the country’s cultural achievements in more sustained, innovative and interesting ways than the government.

Now that the culture ministry appointees of these organisations have failed to meet that demand, organisations like the FD, NFAI and DFF, like the CSFI, will be under the NFDC umbrella. That opens up real estate worth thousands of crores for the government. And hope against hope: Will this move streamline what the government can do for Indian cinema?

So far, there is no information on the future of thousands of historic films and filmic material preserved by the FD, and there’s nothing on the future of the DFF, except we know for sure after this year’s IFFI, that a foreign filmmaker jury better not vocalize his or her opinion on Indian films if that opinion isn't diluted or cautious. After all, Naor Gilon, Israel’s ambassador to India, apologized on behalf of filmmaker Nadav Lapid for Lapid’s personal view on the film The Kashmir Files.

These are doggedly revivalist times, and we know it isn’t all pretty. In the movies, the mythological superhero is resurgent; the colour of a bikini can set in motion fierce offence storms. In the past few years, the cultural mandate has been to look inward, to the indigenous: In 2015, the Union ministry of culture launched a Rs470-crore project called the National Mission on Cultural Mapping and Roadmap. Starting from Mathura, there was going to be a slew of talent hunts across the country—640,000 villages—over three years. Can such a project ensure we have original, radical artistic ideas that can compete with the best in the world? We were to know in three years. Six years later, the exercise has failed to take off. Efforts to identify artistes across the country were reportedly abandoned due to lack of IT and administrative support. Now that project is with the India Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU).

No culture, and that includes films, the most widely accessible, populist, influential and all-encompassing art form, has survived without government support. Historically, autocracies have used cinema as propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, the self-proclaimed patron of German cinema under Hitler, believed pre-Nazi German cinema was about “shamelessness and tastelessness”; his film policy was to promote escapism, designed to distract the population and to keep everybody in good spirits. In the 1930s, a brave new Nazi film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, emerged as a propaganda talent to reckon with. Her two films on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Triumph of the Will and Olympia were recognised worldwide as two of the most effective and technically innovative propaganda films ever made.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many countries in Europe as well the US started funding initiatives to encourage diverse film-making talent and collaborations. In 2000, the UK Film Council, a government organisation much like the NFDC in its motto of earlier years, funded some brilliant cinema including The King’s Speech (2010), a multiple Oscar winner. In 2010, the council was shut down on grounds similar to why the FD, DFF and CFSI have been closed as separate entities: it couldn’t justify its existence proportionate to the funds it was receiving from the UK government. It was merged with the British Film Institute, and under the leadership of 47-year-old Ben Roberts, a veteran of Britain’s distribution and finance sector (he was a vice-president at Hollywood studio Universal before becoming CEO of sales outfit Protagonist Pictures in his 30s, and joined the BFI in 2012 as head of its production fund), the BFI published a 10-year strategy document called Screen Culture in September 2022. This document, available to read online, reveals that the BFI is invested in virtually every area of UK’s film industry:

- Handing out funds to film-makers from the national lottery;

- Running venues including BFI Southbank and its neighbouring Imax cinema;

- Running the National Archive, which holds a renowned collection of film and TV materials;

- Publishing Sight and Sound, a magazine revered by film lovers and film professionals around the world;

- Creating initiatives to increase cinema attendance across the country;

- Certifying film productions for tax relief;

- Operating diversity standards;

- Compiling data on the industry for professionals;

- Running the London Film Festival;

- And running BFI Player, the organisation’s own streaming platform.

The Guardian reported on Roberts’ wider philosophical ambition, which is to “amplify and enhance the cultural status of the moving image, whether it’s film, television or TikTok”. Roberts was quoted as saying, “We quite deliberately use the words screen culture, because I would say that as someone who loves it and who has been involved in it all my adult life, that screen culture is not really valued publicly by stakeholders, educators and parents in the same way as other areas in the arts and culture sector are.”

The new NFDC has a few lessons from Roberts’ new BFI. After Nina Lath Gupta, the most efficient and visionary head in NFDC’s history, was fired in 2018 on apocryphal grounds, Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) chief executive officer Ravinder Bhakar, an officer from the Indian Railway Stores Service (IRSS), will lead the new NFDC with FD, CSFI, DFF and NFAI conjoined. Can Bhakar change the narrative of government support for Indian cinema, or it will be just another phase of stupor and inward thinking that has always plagued government-funded cultural organisations in India?

Take the National Gallery of Modern Art, for instance, which has undoubtedly lost its mojo as the premier art institution for showcasing new, revolutionary artistic talent. Under Adwaita Gadanayak, who became the NGMA director in 2016, a sculptor who was a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s cultural cell in Odisha, and was head of the School of Sculpture at the Bhubaneswar-based KIIT University, the NGMA has spread its mandate a little further within the confines of central Delhi: Gadanayak will now oversee the 25-feet statue of Subhash Chandra Bose, which will come up at India Gate, reportedly in the near future.

In practice, the idea of bureaucrats running cultural organisations or film organisations is not realistically propitious. Nina Lath Gupta was a rare exception. The NFDC initiated some of its best projects during her 12 years at the NFDC: The Lunchbox, Ship of Theseus, Newton, Court, Titli, and Tithi. Gupta started the Film Bazaar at the IFFI, which is India’s only film collaboration market, reviving the NFDC, started in 1975 with the nebulous mandate of “promoting and producing quality cinema in India”.

The Films Division, on the other hand, started zestfully. In 1948, the FD had the job of producing and distributing newsreels and documentary films, Later, it became a repository of audio and visual records of India’s history of decolonisation and the process of nation-building, and till its existence it has safeguarded nearly 8,000 newsreels and documentaries on historical events and political figures. These also include rare works of stalwarts like Satyajit Ray, M.F. Husain, Mani Kaul, Pramod Pati, and more recent films by contemporary filmmakers.

The NFAI was established much later in 1964 with the mandate to trace, acquire, and preserve the heritage of fiction cinema in India. The DFF came into being in 1976, responsible for organising the National Film Award, Dadasaheb Phalke Award, and the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). All four of these institutions have historically provided original prints from their archives for screenings at film festivals, film societies, and educational institutions around the world.

In recent months, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has dismissed more than eight RTI inquiries, and a writ petition by Films Division employees. Numerous articles, public debates and open letters written by concerned filmmakers, historians and archivists have sought clarification on what the consolidated NFDC will do and look like. Filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap wrote on Instagram on December 31 that it was a “black day for Indian cinema” because the FD, NFAI and DFF closed that day.

Indian governments since the 1950s, and especially post-globalisation, have repeatedly failed Indian cinema. The Hindi film industry has suffered the most because of censorship; it has been a soft target for moral police and offence-takers for several years now. If the new NFDC can change that pattern, Indian cinema has a lot to gain. To begin with, if the government decides to topple the existing cinema distribution models by opening independent venues, just for independent cinema and beyond the exorbitant multiplex chains, the cinema consumption landscape will look very different in India in the coming years. Cinema is many things. One of them is its ability to conjure and alchemize hope through stories, scenes and stars. A true film lover wouldn’t lose hope.