Come July 19, Kannada film history will be made. That's when Lucia, the first crowd-funded Kannada film, will hit theatres. Social networks are abuzz about the movie that was able to raise Rs 51 lakh in just 27 days, and another Rs 8 lakh more recently for distribution and publicity. The man behind this experiment is Pawan Kumar, a 30-year-old filmmaker who cites Quentin Tarantino, Christoper Nolan and Anurag Kashyap as his inspiration.
"It was not that I would not have found producers for the film but they would have wanted to play it safe and make changes to the script. And I can't blame them - if I was a producer, I might not have taken the risk, either," says Kumar, in his studio in south Bangalore. Kumar says he wants to make films that will bring back to theatres an audience that has been alienated by two decades of bad films. His directorial debut Lifeu Ishtene, which had a turnover of Rs 5 crore was considered a hit - but he points out that in the same year, 110 of the 120 films released lost money.
The suggestion to opt for crowd-funding at a time when he had never heard of the term, came from an Indian girl in New York he knew on Facebook. She told him many filmmakers in the US were using the route. "When I put up the proposal on my blog and on Facebook I gave myself 100 days to raise the amount, with no expectations." But to his pleasant surprise, money started flowing to the bank account.
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Investors had the choice of contributing in different ways - they could either buy a ticket for $100, $50 or $25 and get the rights to download the film and be credited as a supporter (and get a documentary on the making of the film, if you were in the first two categories) or step up the game and become a producer by investing $5,000, a co-producer at $1,000 or an associate producer by chipping in with $500. This category of investors would also get a share of the returns, depending on the amount invested. Most of the investors, says Kumar, were Kannadigas in the US, a network he had been able to tap because of the 'online theatre' he had set up for Lifeu Ishtene which allowed the diaspora to watch his film online by paying. Kumar says he stopped at Rs 51 lakh, contributed by 110 people, because that was the target he had first set, though he had people who were willing to contribute another Rs 1 crore.
The film was able to stay within budget because people also stepped forward to help in other ways, such as by lending space and vehicles for shooting. And everyone became a genuine stakeholder, from actors who agreed to charge less and accept a small fraction of their fees as cash while the rest would be their investment, to people who informed him of links to pirated versions of the movie soundtrack and helped get them taken down. "And these are the same people who would download pirated versions of other films," Kumar says laughing.
Lucia's investors seem to share Kumar's vision. "Contributing to this movie was less a business decision and more of that of a movie buff who is extremely disappointed with the kind of movies that come from the Indian film industry in general and the Kannada film industry in particular. "I wanted to encourage Pawan since one of his complaints is that there is no scope in Kannada cinema for new concepts," says Balu R, a software engineer in Bangalore who pitched in for the second round of fund-raising to meet distribution expenses.
Kumar, too, says he deliberately stayed away from being endorsed by big names because he wanted newcomers to believe that they too could make it without stars. He, however, remains tightlipped about the storyline, something even his investors have been kept in the dark about, revealing only that Lucia has something to do with insomnia and that there are elements of romance and science-fiction. For the whole picture they, like everyone else, would have to wait for July 19.