They said that women can't open a box office: Director Pan Nalin on 'Angry Indian Goddesses'

Pan Nalin lists the several reasons producers, investors, distributors and film studios cited when they said Angry Indian Goddesses, his film on female bonding that is earning acclaim in the festival circuit, would not work.

"They said that women can't open a box office. Some gave me examples of why a particular movie did not work out because a female star was in the lead. Some producers told me that they loved the film, but asked me why would people come to watch the film, because, they said, these girls might be Indian, but they speak in English."

The filmmaker also remembers a distributor telling him that he usually does not watch the movies, because he does not have time. "He said that usually the producer cuts out a tiny segment for him to watch, and asked me for the parts with all the action, something which is sexy, or has an item number. I was speechless," says Nalin.

Angry Indian Goddesses is the 50-year-old's first foray in mainstream films. His earlier films Samsara, The Valley of Flowers and Faith Connection, opened to a lot of critical acclaim; Samsara was acquired by Miramax. It stars Sandhya Mridul, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Sarah-Jane Dias, Anushka Manchanda, Rajshri Deshpande, Pavleen Gujral, Amrit Maghera and Adil Hussain in the lead roles. Billed as the first female buddy film in India, the film finished second in the People's Choice Awards at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this year, and has been showcased to packed audiences at the Zurich Film Festival.

That brings us to a pressing question: Why did India have to wait till 2015 to have its own female bonding film? Like an aspirant pointed out to Nalin during the auditions, the male buddy film is a sub-genre in Indian films, and we even had a female director helming a successful male bonding film.

The Gujarat-born Canadian filmmaker says that the rot lies in the distribution system, and in looking at a film for being women-centric or not. "Often, the problem with the mainstream film industry, in Bollywood and also Hollywood, is that they perceive a film with a woman in a lead role as a woman-centric film, or as a film with a feminist steak. That's a very wrong approach. Because if you are in the industry of entertainment, you first priority should be to entertain people. And, to entertain people you need a great story. And then, you should worry whether you have a man or a woman or an animal in the lead," he says.

"The problem is the distribution system. If a good film does not come to a screen near you, why will you go? Producers, distributors judge us and say, India is not ready for a film like this. But look at Kahaani, Piku, Queen... " he says. "Of course, India loves the Khans and the Kapoors, but Indians also love movies like this. There's room for both."

Popular culture leads to a lot of these perceptions, adds Tannishtha Chatterjee, who plays the role of Nargis in the movie and is having a particularly good year with Leena Yadav's Parched being shown at TIFF and Ruchika Oberoi's Island Cities being screened at the Venice Film Festival. "We are still unapologetically selling 'item' songs in films, and we're still voting people into power who think that rape is okay," she says. "I'm hoping that Angry Indian Goddesses will raise some relevant and pertinent questions."

Nalin feels that unless there are movies where women behave like themselves, there will be no way forward. "In many movies, producers, directors and screenwriters put in their effort to make the women look like men, talk, fight, and in some, even walk like men, in slow motion. In Angry Indian Goddesses, we wanted to give the actresses freedom with the character and asked them to focus not on the camera but on issues that press them, like how does one look after a career post-marriage, and who looks after the children when they go to work."

That funding was so difficult was no surprise, he says. Jungle Book Entertainment, the production house Nalin formed with friend Gaurav Dhingra, took the first step. "After we made a draft, we felt that we had something to show to the world, and went around for the second time to look for funding. But when all the major studios and producers refused us, we decided to do a series of screenings in Gurgaon, Rajkot, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, and took the film to normal film-loving junta who had never seen my earlier movies," he says. "They simply loved it."

Eventually, a day before they headed to TIFF, distributor Anil Thadani and Nandish of Protein Entertainment picked up the film. It is now gearing for its Indian release.

The audience for movies like Angry Indian Goddesses exists but is limited, says Dr Kaushik Bhaumik, a film scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University. "The size of the niche is small, and distributors fear that the film will not bring in money," he says. "Indian movie-goers are sold to drama and masala plot. Or stars."

Films like Queen, Piku and Kahaani, he says, are proof of a changing social role of the modern women. "The concept of the female buddy is evolving as social phenomena and that makes for better conversations."