Indie films bring new Indian cinema to Cannes

Dealing with corruption and coal mafias, impotency and the porn industry, the films in this years line-up are part of a burgeoning, alternative Bollywood that departs from commercial song-and-dance hits so popular at home.Indian cinema is coming of age. We are ready to interact with filmmakers from across the world, said Anurag Kashyap, who has a hand in two of the productions showing at Cannes.Kashyap directed the longest-running entry in the festival, Gangs of Wasseypur, a five hour and 20 minute film he describes as a Bollywood-influenced gangster epic, part Western, part documentary.With a folk-meets-dubstep soundtrack and a basis in true stories, the film follows three generations of coal and scrap-trade mafia gangs in a suburb in east India who are obsessed with traditional Hindi cinema.These people grow up wanting to be gangsters, they dont go to school or colleges, they watch Bollywood, he told AFP. Everyone has a false sense of film screen heroism that they follow.He is also excited about the experimental Peddlers, backed by his Anurag Kashyap Films production house, which is running in the other main sidebar section at Cannes, Critics Week.Directed by newcomer Vasan Bala and financed through appeals on Facebook, the Mumbai-based movie takes on subject matters which are normal and everywhere but still considered taboo in cinema, Kashyap said.Like a man dealing with his own impotency, and how it brings out the violence in him, and quite fearlessly the camera just lingers on, watches these lives, almost like a voyeur.Kashyap believes the role of social networking will grow in funding future indie productions by appealing to Indian cinephiles who want something other than the typical action-packed, romantic, comedy musical.Mainstream Bollywood has always been there and it caters to people who need it, but the other kind of cinema is almost absent, he said.The mainstream itself is starting to grapple with broader content, but the fact it operates in a movie-mad country of 1.2 billion people could be to blame for the slow pace of change.Indias presence at Cannes is generating high expectations: 2012 could be the beginning of a new romance between film festivals and Hindi cinema, said a column in the daily Hindustan Times.Kashyap, who is working with British Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle on a film about 1960s Mumbai, hopes the exposure can help to change perceptions of Indian cinema and boost ties with foreign filmmakers.