For India and Brazil, a Rare Tie-up in Cinema

RIO DE JANEIRO – After challenging the Bollywood establishment by making provocative independent cinema, the Indian director Anurag Kashyap is now breaking another barrier — geography. In his support of emerging filmmakers, he has agreed to co-produce a film with Beatriz Seigner of Brazil, his first collaboration with a South American.

Ms. Seigner, 27, who wrote the script and will also direct what will be her second feature film, said during a recent interview in Rio de Janeiro that the movie’s fictional story is based on the real-life struggles of a Colombian friend and her family forced to live with a secret about their father’s peculiar death.

The shooting of “Five Lives and a Secret,” the working title, is expected to start next year, with the dialogue in Spanish and the location somewhere on the Colombia-Brazil border. Ms. Seigner said she wants to pick an ambiguous location, “a place where you don’t know where you are,” which would give it more universal appeal.

The two filmmakers first met last year after Ms. Seigner invited Mr. Kashyap to São Paulo for an Indian film festival showcasing his work, which she had organized. They will meet at the Cannes International Film Festival, now under way, to plan the next steps for the new project. After the script is set, they will start fund-raising later this year.

“It will be quite a process, but the film is worth it,” Mr. Kashyap said in an interview.

Punit Paranjpe/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBollywood director Anurag Kashyap during an interview in Mumbai, Maharashtra in this May 12, 2012 file photo.

It is a rare example of a cultural exchange between India and Brazil at a time when both countries still know little about each other, even though both are part of the BRICS emerging economies group, which also includes Russia, China and South Africa.

Within the BRICS group, India and Brazil have long tried to convey a unique kinship. For a decade now, their political leaders have stressed their common democratic values, interests and ambitions. The former Brazilian president, Luiz InÁcio Lula da Silva, visited India twice. His successor, Dilma Rousseff, traveled there in March.

However, business and cultural exchanges between the two countries remain negligible. Overall trade is still under $10 billion, with oil accounting for approximately half of that.

The two countries simply do not know each other, Brazilian business and political leaders say. Distance remains a key barrier: there are no direct flights between the countries, and neither has a sizable immigrant community from the other country.

And Brazil’s mainstream media gives little importance to the relationship, for example, providing little coverage on the recent meeting between Ms. Rousseff and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi.

Mr. Kashyap and Ms. Seigner are hoping to strengthen the ties between Brazil and India, aware that filmmakers can often have a greater impact than diplomats and politicians do.

The two countries “have very little information about each other and very little awareness of each other,” he said. But, he added, “the day we discover we have many commonalities, from food to belief system, there will be much improvement in our relationship.”

Mr. Kashyap has some familiarity with Brazil through cinema. He said he has been influenced by the Brazilian filmmakers Glauber Rocha, Walter Salles, Fernando Meirelles and JosÉ Padilha. And Ms. Seigner as a teenager lived in Tamil Nadu for one year, learning Odissi dance.

Bollywood Dream Web site.A scene from “O Sonho Bollywoodiano” (Bollywood Dream), a 2008 film directed by Beatriz Seigner.

That experience stayed with her, influencing her first feature film, “O Sonho Bollywoodiano” (Bollywood Dream), in 2008. In the film, three young Brazilian actresses arrive in India with hopes of landing roles in Bollywood to jump-start their fledgling careers. “O Sonho Bollywoodiano” was a cult hit in Brazil and finished second in the audience favorite category at the 2009 São Paulo International Film Festival.

Making the movie taught Ms. Seigner about the obstacles to film distribution among traditional outlets in both countries. In Brazil, her film was not released until 2011, but it played in major theaters in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro for two months, a significant amount of time for an independent film.

In India, “O Sonho Bollywoodiano” was never released in cinemas. Ram Devineni, head of New York City-based Rattapallax Films, who co-produced the movie with Ms. Seigner, said that he had approached some small and mid-tier distributors in India but that the distributors thought the film would need major changes to appeal to Indian audiences. For example, he said, they wanted to dub the movie in Hindi and add dance and musical sequences.

“They were trying to make it a Bollywood film,” rather than thinking of it as either a Hollywood or a foreign film, he said.

Mr. Devineni said that he never even told Ms. Seigner about some of the requested changes because he knew it would be “a non-starter with her.”

“It would completely ruin the whole point of the movie,” he said.

“O Sonho Bollywoodiano” has run on the international film festival circuit over the past two years. Although few Indians ever saw Ms. Seigner’s movie, one person who did turned out to be an important one: Mr. Kashyap.

When they finally met last year, Mr. Kashyap asked Ms. Seigner to see her new projects. She says that she demurred, because the script for her second film was only 75 percent complete at that time, but he insisted. He read it in one sitting and decided immediately that he wanted to be involved. “I have never seen anything like that before,” he said.

“It’s a very human story. It is my window into South America and their way of life,” he said, adding that “the humanity of the story could be Indian.”

Whether Ms. Seigner’s second film will be distributed in India is unknown. “People don’t like to see in cinema what they don’t know,” Mr. Kashyap said. “I am not doing this thinking about how it’ll be received in India. I am doing this thinking of a global audience.”

Yet much is changing in how films are distributed and viewed, thanks to digital media growth.

This year, “O Sonho Bollywoodiano” was shown as part of Circuito Fora do Eixo, a movement of independent Brazilian artists that organizes events nationwide, incorporating social media.

As part of that, Ms. Seigner said that her film was shown in 68 cities in Brazil, representing all 27 states, in a three-week period. Often, she joined via Skype after screenings for question-and-answer sessions, with an average of 70 people attending, she said. She found many more Brazilians curious about India than she had expected.

Mr. Kashyap said he was intrigued by this model and hoped that they can tap into it once their co-production is finished. “Brazilian independent filmmakers are doing something that India could follow,” he said.