[20 February 2010]
Today was the last day here in Berlin. We were free for most of the day. I didn’t even have any film ticket for the day. So I took time in sending some mails to India, and then took real long time to pack everything as there were lots of books, catalogues, cards that I had collected during my stay in Berlin. Had to sort them out, leave some things behind. By the time I finished everything, it was about 12 and we were supposed to meet for lunch by 12:30 at the hotel lobby. Since these were the last chances to get together as a group before we leave for our own countries, I didn’t want to miss it.
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Categories: Berlinale · Daily Blog · Travelogue
[19 February 2010]
The temperature since last two days has increased considerably. The ice has started melting since two days and today it was more obvious as there is water everywhere. Today was full of meetings and group activity. However, I was bit too tired since the morning. Mostly since last night I slept quite late and woke up early in the morning, I had little sleep.
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Categories: Berlinale · Daily Blog · Society · Travelogue
[18 February 2010]
It was a breakfast meeting for the first time during our present stay in Berlin though technically it was the second one. We had the man-in-charge for the visibility of German films in the world cinema committee. It was interesting to learn the ways in which this plan their visibility across the media, festivals, market, television, DVD etc. the kind of money they are spending on this is huge. But then they are following a systematic way to achieve their targets. For them, even art house cinema is a cinema and they have market for that world wide too. I personally found it very intriguing to know how they find a market and promote the art house films. Filmmakers like us in Karnataka; we largely depend on the government subsidies and help for such films. So all that we spend on our films are the funds, which can possibly recovered by these helping funds (which is very less!) so we are in a fix always about making films within small budget and many such films made with compromised budgets, fighting for the budget from the government. In this way, there is no possibility for growth in quality of our filmmaking. It is not that we don’t have the talent, but it is the constraints that are keeping us away from the ambitious projects. Countries like Germany, France, Netherlands they all have international understanding to produce films. So the film festivals have networks amongst them and they systematically plan and support films and growth of cinema in general. It’s ironical that India produces highest number of films each year but it has no presence in this support system! Don’t we need collaboration? Or are we just happy making Bollywood films!?
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Categories: Berlinale · Society · Travelogue
[17 February 2010]
Today was one of the most expected days for me. But turned out to be a little disappointing and later became interesting and ended with a happy note. Today was the world cinema fund day. We had a presentation regarding the world cinema fund and in that was a panel discussion regarding the world cinema fund. But then the panel discussion somehow turned towards Iranian cinema and was not all that interesting. But at the same time there were several points making very much sense to me as the conditions in India were similar in many senses when it came to the producers! On one hand international funding would be exciting and lucrative for countries like India where the foreign exchange rates play magic with our film budgets.
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Categories: Berlinale · Daily Blog · Society · Travelogue
