Thoughts on Screening My First Film In India

Making a film or any art requires blind faith and maniacal devotion. Only the foolish and obsessed embark on such perilous journeys, mostly against all advice. The everyday terror of failure, rejection and financial ruin haunts you while the joy of creation keeps you going. Screening the film for an audience involves trepidation and drunken butterflies. Critics who thoughtlessly slaughter the works of artists who have labored thousands of hours to bring something new into the world have no idea of what it takes to create anything, to put yourself on the line. 

While my strange little film "Madly"- a sort of trembling and derelict global state of the union of love- has been enthusiastically received in the USA and elsewhere, I flew to Mumbai for its first screening in India with nervousness. India today is turbulent, churning with angst and repression, it's courageous and resilient women still uncelebrated and oppressed. What would audiences think of Anurag Kashyap's incendiary "Clean Shaven" and would they resoundingly reject the passionate madness of the other shorts in "Madly"? I was born in India and the response to my first film here was important to me. Would this be the last one I make?

The lines have been long for "Madly" at the #JIOMAMI, Mumbai Film Festival with all shows selling out within minutes. At last night's screening, I introduced the film to an excited audience who sighed, laughed, clapped and cheered the end of each segment. In the Q&A afterwards with me, "Clean Shaven" director Anurag Kashyap, the film's talented writer Eisha Chopra and rising actor Adarsh Gourav, questions from the audience and their overwhelmingly passionate response to the film painted a very different picture in my mind about the sophistication of Indian audiences than the popular belief. Even if they were mostly film fans and metropolitans, their incisive observations and spot-on questions clearly articulated a hunger for bold film making- the kind of brilliant movies WE USED TO MAKE DECADES AGO and some intrepid film makers are still making. The modern, global Indian as well as the self-aware local is alive and well and ready to receive progressive cinema.

It was a thrill to get such a warm reception for my pean to love, but more importantly I came away from last night's screening with great optimism for artists and film makers in India and elsewhere. Things have changed and are changing for the better. 

Thank you, Bombay!