Prosenjit lights the inaugural lamp of Film Market at Nandan on Saturday, flanked by Soumitra Chatterjee and Sanjay Budhia. Picture by Aranya Sen

The unveiling of the Film Market at the 12th Calcutta Film Festival on the Nandan grounds on Saturday afternoon drew a bigger crowd than ever before, with a stream of foreign delegates, city cine-goers and those attached to the local film industry.

“The Film Market was started in 2003 and the fact that so many people have turned up today is a healthy sign,” observed veteran actor and festival chairman Soumitra Chatterjee.

So, will the market, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) for the fourth time in a row, finally mean business this time? “This kind of an effort takes some time,” said Sanjay Budhia, CII chairman and managing partner of Patton. “In the first few years, we were aiming at establishing the idea of a film market. Now I think it’s time for hardcore business. The Bengali film industry has a lot of potential and that’s why we have taken this initiative under the CII umbrella. But more companies should come forward.”

The Eastern India Motion Picture Association (Eimpa) and the Federation of Film Societies have pitched in to set up the Film Market with CII.

One visible step forward was the narrowing gap between ‘commercial’ and ‘art’ films, with Tollywood star Prosenjit being called on to light the inaugural lamp. One of the stalls displayed a huge poster of the Prosenjit-Rituparna super hit Laatsaheb.

“Film-making has become so expensive these days that only local exhibition becomes a risky proposition for the producers. Marketing and packaging have become crucial for a film. This market is especially important for those who make movies of a different kind. But it’s also important for commercial films. We all have to come together... If Bhojpuri films can be marketed abroad, why not Bengali films?” wondered Prosenjit.

Nandan CEO and festival director Nilanjan Chatterjee echoed: “We want to bridge the gap between marketing and art.” A handful of Tollywood producers and exhibitors were spotted at the first day, first show of the movie mart.

The seven-day Film Market will feature interactive sessions, hosted by the Federation of Film Societies and Artistes Forum, with directors whose films are part of the festival fare.

The stalls in the tent comprise Channel B Entertainment (which spread out its collection of CDs and DVDs of old and contemporary Bengali movies), Cine Art Directors’ Guild, Toonz Webel Academy, Nugget Entertainment, 24 Ghanta, Aranyak Wildlife and the makers of the recent release Manush Bhoot.

Soumitra Chatterjee released the festival publication Kolkata Kaleidoscope, a city guide for foreign delegates. Among the other events unveiled on Saturday were the Book Bazaar, a film festival fixture on the grounds and the Short & Documentary Film Festival at Bangla Akademi.

An act of faith

Everyone must visit the Kumbh Mela once, it is an experience of a lifetime,” insists Sagarika Ghose, before the Calcutta launch of her second novel, Blind Faith, at the Oxford Bookstore. The climax of the novel plays itself out at the Maha Kumbh Mela of 2001.

Ghose had been there in January 2001, a journalist with feet firmly grounded in secular ideas. But the Maha Kumbh can surprise even the most hardened secularist. “It made me wake up to the endurance of faith, and of India,” says the author, who felt compelled to weave her imagination with her lived experience of the gargantuan, yet unobtrusive, magnificence.

And then, eight months later, 9/11 happened, and the world was a somewhat altered place. The event and its aftermath “set me thinking about people who are engaged in a hot pursuit of death as a glorifying agent — like the Japanese kamikaze pilots of WW-II”.

Thus, in Blind Faith, destruction is written right into the middle of the Purification Journey; the seller of Vedic eye-liners and Nirvana face masks turns the metaphor of make-up upside down. The brilliant, beautiful, blind mother, Indi, throws down the gauntlet at orthodox religion which cannot accept the woman as a sexual being, but only as a mother.

Ghose’s inspirations have come from diverse quarters — from Advaita philosophy to German thinker Ernst Junger, from doppelgangers to mystic men, and more. The characters dart from Belsize Park, London, to Alqueria, Goa, via Kumbh, and it is not difficult to guess that the author must have grown up and worked in many cities and countries. Calcutta (a city which still holds a special place for her), Delhi, London and New York are some of them.

But Ghose is uncomfortable thinking of herself as a writer, a creature who comes with too much glamour attached these days. She considers herself to be a journalist first, who writes as a hobby, usually after she drops her kids, 13 and 11, off at the bus stop in the morning. Not surprising, then, that Mia in Blind Faith is a television journalist. Ghose herself made the switch from print to electronic medium last year. But it isn’t all autobiographical — Ghose does not share her character’s disenchantment with her profession at all.

Quite the opposite, in fact. She feels that her entry into fiction-writing happened as a result of a need to talk about her different experiences which could not be accommodated within deadlined reports or three-minute visual capsules. Ghose regrets the fact that she can neither devote much time these days to writing or reading her favourite authors, Marquez, Annie Proulx or Margaret Drabble.

“But so far television has treated me well,” says she. And as long as the adrenalin flows when the camera starts, Sagarika Ghose is not complaining.

Sreyashi Dastidar

Comeback girl: Sameera Reddy

There’s going to be a lot of Sameera Reddy in Calcutta this month. First up, Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Kalpurush, which will be the concluding festival film at Nandan I next Friday, where the dusky Bollywood beauty transforms into a middle-class Bangali bou. More’s in store in end-November, when Sameera will spend time shooting her second Bengali film with Dasgupta at Bharat Lakshmi Studio on Prince Anwar Shah Road. This time, Tollywood star Prosenjit will be the reel man in her life.