Kiran Rao, film critic Anupama Chopra and directors Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Rohan Sippy will pool in their expertise to make FilmBay a vibrant space that provides a platform for alternate cinema. But playing a crucial role in this alliance is Nina Lath Gupta, Managing Director, National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC), which endeavours to facilitate the growth of good cinema in India.
NFDC has procured the premises at Bandra on a 30-year lease from the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM). The film centre will have a board constituted by two representatives of NFDC and one from the MCGM besides members of the film fraternity.
“At NFDC, we have always focussed on the development of films and by that we don’t mean just the production, but the entire gamut of the business of films, right from content development to audience development. And that is where FilmBay fits in,” says Gupta.
“We have had the idea of creating a space like FilmBay for a long time now, but realisation is always difficult because many factors are involved.” Gupta points to the example of NFDC’s Tagore Film Centre in Chennai, which it created as an alternative distribution and screening platform, but which is not the kind of cultural centre that the institution hopes FilmBay will be. “It will be an amalgamation of citizens and creative talent, of academics and businesses. We hope it will be a melting pot of people coming together for the common love of cinema,” she says.
The centre, which will work on a membership model, will have children’s films as an important component, she reveals, with special screenings being planned for the children of municipal schools.
