‘We do not need extravagant organisation, awards, or ceremonies but only reasonable slots’ in theatres.
In an open letter, directors whose films were chosen for the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival’s 2022 edition have protested the cancellation of the event and demanded physical screenings of the selected titles. The co-signees of the open letter include 16 directors and producers whose films featured in competitive and non-competitive sections. These are as follows: Achal Mishra, Aditya Vikram Sengupta, Faraz Ali, Gurvinder Singh, Haobam Paban Kumar, Himadri Mahesh, Irfana Majumdar, Natesh Hegde, Nithin Lukose, Payal Kapadia, Ranabir Das, Prantik Basu, Rahat Mahajan, Rahul Jain, Srishti Lakhera and Bhamati Sivapalan. Filmmaker Sanal Kumar Sasidharan has added his name to the list in solidarity. The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival cancelled the event in early February because of “logistical and financial challenges”, according to communication sent to the participating filmmakers. “Despite our best efforts, it has become untenable for us to hold the festival in March,” part of the communication stated. In an email to Scroll.in, the event organiser, the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images, said, “We have a larger more over-arching logistical reimagining parked at our doorstep that takes into account the way the world has altered to live between waves. However, we will continue to screen films digitally as part of our year-round programme on our digital screening platform (Shift72).” The festival’s title sponsor is the telecom giant Jio. Some of the films chosen for the festival are being streamed online this week. In the open letter, the filmmakers, some of whom had withdrawn their projects from other festivals in order to give Mumbai exclusive access, demanded that “MAMI hold physical screenings of our films over a shorter period of time”.
