Is MAMI The Next Big International Film Festival?

India doesn’t have a single film festival that holds international significance, enough to make or break a film’s future. So, with that in mind, can MAMI be the next big film festival of the world?

The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival is still a relatively a new festival, very young in it’s age, compared to mammoths of the west, and without a rich legacy to fawn over, but since it’s beginning, it has been a festival ‘to be at’ for South Asian (especially Indian) cinephiles.

Solely from an outsider’s perspective, the publicity this year has been unlike any before with sponsors like AJIO, JioMart, Reliance Trends, Reliance Digital and Tira (among many others) backing the event. Of course, most of the sponsors being from the Ambani empire with Isha and Nita Ambani even being board members of the film festival, brings into question the amount of influence one particular family has on this creative endeavor that decides which films are to be considered as “prestige cinema”, but that’s an issue outside the scope of this article. Shall talk about that matter another time!

MAMI already has big names in the entertainment industry supporting the event, with Priyanka Chopra Jonas being the Chairperson, but aside from being the cinephile haven, which it has always been, this time what’s been different is it’s collaboration with the newly launched NMACC, the participation of commercial Hindi film actors, and overall high-scale nature of the program.

The festival opened with Hansal Mehta’s The Buckingham Murders starring Kareena Kapoor Khan, who just so happens to be at a turning point in her career where she’s deliberately seeking out roles that challenge her acting muscles. As one of the top Bollywood actors makes space for herself among the parallel cinema crowd, we are also seeing a wonderful line-up awaiting to be seen by the attendees with some extremely interesting movies to be premiered.

Even the red carpet, which was rather simple every year, brought out the big guns with popular celebrities like Kareena Kapoor Khan, Priyanka Chopra Jonas (who specially came to India for the festival), Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Saif Ali Khan, Bhumi Pednekar, Karisma Kapoor and Sobhita Dhulipala showing up at the event in heavy couture pieces. The glam was to such a degree that anyone in a simple gown felt rather out of place. It doesn’t hurt that the fashion definitely brought more eye balls to the otherwise niche festival.

In Hollywood, end of the year is always a busy time with multiple film festivals taking place, and the industry gearing up for the awards season. If a movie wants to be taken seriously as an awards contender, it has to make it’s way through the festival circuit. It, at least, increases it’s chances of getting nominated.

India, so far, doesn’t have a single film festival that holds a certain level of international significance, enough to make or break a film’s future. Granted, most of the “prestigious” film festivals are from predominantly white countries, so there could also be racism at play here that has historically and systematically kept black and brown countries behind by not recognizing their creation as art/cinema.

So, with that in mind, can MAMI be the next big film festival of the world? I don’t know, but it definitely seems like it’s well on it’s way there. The festival has support from one of the richest people in the world, it’s marketing this year has been great, it’s jury is top-notch, the films it selects are consistently appreciated by the critics, and their guest lineup has always been awesome (Luca Guadagnino has been invited this year). The only thing that was missing all this time was the good ol’ fashion glamour which seems to have found it’s way to the red carpet this year.

Now, the only thing MAMI has to do is start positioning itself as an international festival and decide what kind of festival it wants to be. Does it want to be like Cannes or Venice and go all out on the glamour and spectacle, or does it want to be like TIFF and NYFF where glamour and prestige are equally presented? Or should it simply go the Sundance and Telluride route and opt for a completely laid-back approach with celebrities showing up in sweaters and jeans?

Personally, I’d love some glamour balanced perfectly with prestige because there’s a severe lack of serious events in India where fashion is also given equal importance. Either way, it’s important that we start having films from all over the world work hard to get validation from an Indian film festival as opposed to the other way around.