BUSAN — India and Tajikistan do not have many ties by way of film co-production, but Bollywood films dubbed in the Tajik language are immensely popular in Tajikistan. More than 500 are dubbed every year.
A battle sequence in Yash Raj Films’ “The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey” (2005), starring Bollywood icons Aamir Khan and Rani Mukerji and British actor Toby Stephens, was shot at Tajikistan’s Aychi village, close to the Afghanistan border.
In 2013, the Tajikistan foreign minister requested Bollywood filmmakers to shoot films there, positioning it as a cheaper and geographically and culturally closer alternative to Switzerland, and promised to make the process smooth. Nothing has come of that proposal so far.
“Parvona,” a film project at the Busan Film Festival‘s Asian Project Market, aims to change this scenario. The film is about a pregnant, young Tajik woman, Parvona, who searches for a family willing to buy her unborn baby. Tajikistan-based filmmaker Sharofat Arabova will direct.
Arabova is an alumnus of Busan’s Asian Film Academy. Her debut feature “Tasfiya” won the Tajik Film Experts and Critics Award at Tajikistan’s Didor International Film Festival in 2014, and has seen considerable festival play. In 2015, she was on the NETPAC juries at the Moscow International Film Festival and Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.
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Pushpendra Singh is producing via his Indian outfit Marudhar Arts. He has put in the initial equity and is looking to begin raising the rest of the $300,000 budget at Busan. Thereafter the project will apply to European funds and grants.
Singh’s directorial debut “Lajwanti” was a Berlin selection in 2014 and he is in negotiations with Netflix on it. Singh’s directorial venture “Shifting Lines of the Desert” has been awarded the Asian Cinema Fund for documentary from the Busan Film Festival this year.
Singh and Arabova met while studying at the Film and Television Institute of India, in Pune. “When I read the story, to me it was like an Indian story,” says Singh. A woman, whose husband abandons her, she realizes she’s pregnant. What does she do?”
“There is no market for such films in my country,” says Arabova. “There is no industry and distribution for this kind of story. So the release will be in the countries that provide the funding.” Singh adds that with the proliferation of streaming services, the whole world is a market.
Arabova heads the Creative Union of Young Filmmakers at the State Tajikfilm Studio in Dushanbe. The studio is expected to board “Parvona” either as a co-producer or as a partner. The project will be developed for a year before commencing principal photography in late 2017.
