A Telugu film at Berlin

Vanaja, a Telugu film directed by Rajnesh Domalpalli, won the best first feature award at Berlin film festival. He happens to be an engineer who did his bachelors in IIT Bombay, and a Masters from SUNY, SB, and he had written the film while studying film at Columbia University.

In recent times, Telugu film makers who've won acclaim happen to be engineers turned film makers. Sekhar Kammula, Nagesh Kukunoor for example. And Telugu film makers have been winning acclaim for first films. Sekhar Kammula and Mohankrishna I. won their best first feature national awards for their first films Dollar dreams and Grahanam, but thereafter haven't been noticed much. It remains to be seen if the Telugu film will move beyond Andhra Pradesh, the state where the language is most spoken. There is a film industry that produces mostly insipid fare, as the directors aren't very inspired, and all the producers are after is money. This new crop of film makers has the distinction of having an education in film, unlike the others who came up the ladder beginning as nobodies in the film industry.

Sekhar Kammula and Mohankrishna I. have moved into the industry, and while they have made only a few films to comment on, the films are only a minor improvement over the insipid films of the industry in terms of their content. There's of course the issue of money. Who would fund films that do not find an audience among the people who're willing to pay to watch insipid fare, but would not watch a more seriously made film, dismissing it as an "art film". The issue is about finding an audience, and I am sure there is one for serious films even in Andhra Pradesh, leave alone the entire world (and that's not very unreasonable given how videos find a worldwide audience on Youtube). What must be done is to make a viable business plan for such films, and more than that convince the people involved in producing the films that these "art films" can work financially.