In 1976, Shyam Benegal started work on a film calledManthan. The beauty of the film, based on a story written by Dr Verghese Kurienand Bengal, was that it traced the stories of a small group of farmers who gottogether for the collective good of society. Soon that pattern was replicatedin different areas in Gujarat, leading to the formation of Amul. But thatwasn’t all. The money for the film was sourced through the contributions of50,000 farmers, who paid a small sum of Rs 2, each. That is the essence of anew wave of financing films in India, called crowd-funding.
At the Film Bazaar, actor/producer Sanjay Suri, PriyankaAgarwal, the founder of wishberry.in, legal expert Ameet Naik and KPMGexecutive Nidhi Maheshwari, came together to discuss the new wave of funding inIndia. Sanjay Suri and Onir’s ‘I Am’ was a film that was financed this way, byasking friends and relatives first and then getting film students to investwhatever they could in the film. The duo then took it once step further by‘crowd-sourcing’, getting the secondary cast and the crew for the film, as wellas promoting it, by going viral “ asking people to shoot short films and postit online. The promos created a buzz around the film as 400 people in 40 citiesacross the world participated in the film as ‘co-producers’. ‘I Am’ won theNational Award in 2012. “Nobody backs projects. They back people,” says SanjaySuri, emphasising the need to have personal interactions with the people whofund the project, via email, constant updates etc.
Crowd funding is like a pound party, where everyone bringssomething to the table and the party begins. The trick is to get people toinvest in your project and that’s where wishberry.in comes in. Modelled alongthe lines of ‘kickstarter’ in the US, wishberry.in works with individuals andgroups to showcase their ideas via video and get people to invest in theproject. “Friends and family will give you money anyway. Out of pity, ifnothing else,” says Priyanka Agarwal, with a grin. Once the money startsflowing in, the main team has a responsibility to update the funders on theprogress of the film and let them know where the money is going. “Nothinghappens in isolation,” says Suri, adding “one needs passion and focus. You alsoneed to know your target audience, to market the film as well as gettingpartners for it.”
