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Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival

I’m a film festival junkie. I love the frenzy and passion that festivals arouse, the atmosphere charged with excitement around new films about to be discovered, the thrill of sighting stars and directors, and the perverse pleasure of standing in line with strangers because a certain title can’t be missed (my record is three hours at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 for Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood). Festivals are a celebration of cinema. A movie carnival. When you are in one, it’s so consuming that you briefly believe that nothing else matters but film.

Despite this, I was not a devotee of the one closest to home: the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. The festival has a rich history. It was started in 1997 by stalwarts of Hindi cinema—filmmakers like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Bhattacharya, Amol Palekar, Ramesh Sippy and Shyam Benegal. Manmohan Shetty, producer and then owner of Adlabs (the biggest film laboratory in Mumbai), Sudhir Nandgaonkar (one of the founding members of Mumbai’s oldest film society, Prabhat Chitra Mandal) and Amit Khanna (lyricist, producer, entrepreneur) played key roles. The idea was to create a film festival run by film professionals.

Over the years, the festival—usually held in October—became a destination for film lovers. Nagesh Kukunoor’s Hyderabad Blues, which kickstarted the indie film movement in India, broke out at the festival in 1998. In 2013, there was Nagraj Manjule’s remarkable Fandry. Oliver Stone visited in 2010, and Zhang Yimou in 2012. Costa-Gavras, Leos Carax and Asghar Farhadi also came. MAMI, as it is popularly known because it is organized by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (a non-profit trust), was flourishing. But the festival was held largely in south Mumbai, a one-hour drive each way, which was difficult to negotiate. Ironically, I flew to festivals around the world but ended up rarely going to the one in my backyard.

That changed in 2014. MAMI is almost entirely privately funded, which makes it wholly dependent on corporate sponsors. That year, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Entertainment, which had supported the festival for five years, decided not to renew the contract. MAMI had no corpus to fall back on. The festival was scheduled to be held from 14 to 21 October, but until late August, no new sponsors had been found and a shutdown seemed imminent. On 29 August, an article titled ‘Mumbai’s Rs 5 Crore shame: Who will pay for a film festival?’ was published on the website Sify Movies. It was written by IANS journalist Satyen K. Bordoloi. The article went viral, travelling widely on Twitter, which is where I saw it. My first thought was, we can’t let this happen. The film capital of the country can’t be devoid of a film festival.

Over the next few weeks, I became a film activist. I reached out to friends and strangers to beg for money for the festival. My husband Vinod donated money and also bullied others into opening their wallets. A builder friend who has nothing to do with the movies wrote a cheque. As did industrialist Anand Mahindra, producer Manish Mundra, actors Aamir Khan and Sonam Kapoor, Lionsgate Studio, and hundreds of MAMI lovers who donated what they could. The hashtags #SaveMAMI and #SaveMFF trended on Twitter. The outpouring of support was overwhelming. In four weeks, we managed to raise enough money to hold the festival.

MAMI was essentially quicksand—after raising money, I got sucked into planning the execution of the event. I roped in my producer Smriti Kiran and associate Kalpana Nair, who had already worked with me on several projects including the popular Star World show, The Front Row. We worked closely with then festival director Srinivasan Narayanan and his team. Opening night at Chandan Cinema in suburban Mumbai was especially anxiety-inducing. The stage was so narrow that I was concerned that one of our esteemed guests—Helen, who got the lifetime achievement award, or Aishwarya Rai Bachchan or the formidable Catherine Deneuve—might topple off it. Earlier that evening, Vinod’s production people were called in to clean up the bathrooms of the forty-year-old theatre. We were petrified that Deneuve might want to freshen up.

The week was filled with highs and lows. I remember one day, all of us danced, for no good reason, at a PVR theatre, to Pharrell Williams’s Happy. Closing night felt like a physical load had been taken off my chest. Fittingly, the logo of the festival that year was a phoenix.

In December that year, a board meeting was held and the management of the festival was officially handed over to us— filmmaker Kiran Rao became chairperson; I, festival director; and Smriti, creative director. The titles were impressive but we had inherited a leaking ship: MAMI came to us with a skeletal team and a debt of Rs 75 lakh. Over the next six months, we scrambled to find money. Smriti, Kiran and I became salespeople, travelling from one corporate office to another, hoping to convince brands to sign on. We were often asked: what is the ROI? We didn’t even know at first that ROI meant return on investment.

How do you measure the ROI of a film festival? What price tag can you put on an event that fosters creativity, shapes mindsets and nurtures the next generation of storytellers? In India, a festival becomes even more valuable because most of the films shown (complex, layered and difficult to market) are unlikely to get a commercial release. Viewers might be able to access some of them on streaming platforms but the festival becomes the only space for a big-screen experience of these movies. Most importantly, a festival gives viewers a chance to watch films uncensored. The image is received exactly as the director intended it to be, untainted by smoking warnings and bleeps, untouched by cuts. In India, this is an unimaginable luxury.

Thankfully, two entertainment behemoths, Star India and Jio, saw value in MAMI. Star signed on first, in February 2015. Kiran, Smriti and I were at the Berlin Film Festival, huddled in a shuttle van, when the call came from Gayatri Yadav, then executive vice president for marketing and communications at Star India. She gave us the happy news that Star was on board as associate sponsor. In June that year, Jio came on board as principal sponsor, with Nita Ambani joining as co-chairperson and Isha Ambani joining the MAMI board. We had found the anchors the festival so desperately needed.

MAMI was the first time, to paraphrase the words of Theodore Roosevelt, I ‘dared greatly’. It was the first time, professionally, I had the privilege of building something from the ground up. We reconstructed the festival brick by brick and experienced both spectacular failure (no one showed up to one of my favourite initiatives, open-air screenings for the public) and exhilarating success (the 2015 opening ceremony was at the Gateway of India and the 2016 opening at the newly renovated Royal Opera House).

We learned to choose our battles wisely, deflect criticism with grace and accept that there were things we simply couldn’t control. I understood then that to work at a film festival is to be a career diplomat. ‘Please’ and ‘Sorry’ became a consistent part of my vocabulary.

I don’t consider myself a professional festival person. I am, by instinct, a film critic and a journalist. But I see my work at MAMI as a way to give back to cinema and to the film industry. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity.