The organisers of MAMI Mumbai Film Festival have responded to last week’s open letter from 17 filmmakers and said that they are working on a plan to hold physical screenings for those films that are not scheduled for a release in India anytime soon.
“We feel the disappointment of the filmmakers. We are working on a plan to manage a physical screening for films in our selection that do not screen in India in the near future. Whenever that is possible, we will get in touch and work with the filmmakers to make it happen,” read the statement from the festival’s board of trustees that was acquired by Silverscreen India.
“But we do not, as we have said repeatedly, want to make promises we cannot keep. We have never requested any of our filmmakers to make choices in our favour or to hold back from whatever they feel is the best platform for their film and we do not want to do it now,” the statement added.
The organisers also revealed that an associate sponsor had discontinued their partnership with MAMI, putting additional pressure on them, and noted that the cancellation of an edition of the festival is a last resort measure, taken after much deliberation.
The 2020 edition of MAMI was cancelled in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the festival’s 22nd edition, which was originally scheduled for November 2021, was tentatively postponed to March 11-15, 2022.
However, as per the filmmakers’ open letter from February 25, an email from the organisers earlier in the month had stated that it had become untenable to conduct the event in March due to ‘continuing pandemic, logistical and financial challenges’.
The directors, whose films were selected for screening in the India Story, Spotlight, and India Gold sections of the festival, expressed their disappointment over this in their open letter that was addressed to chairperson and actor Priyanka Chopra.
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“Some of us were officially selected in the 2020 edition, and had saved our India premieres for two years, waiting for this festival. Others had turned down multiple other festivals in India in favour of MAMI. Some of us had paid submission fees to MAMI. Most of us were counting on the festival to give our films visibility and a unique opportunity to share them with audiences, the industry and market, as most of our films will not get distribution in the way commercial films do. None of us have a plan for how to proceed now,” they wrote.
The letter further noted that while many of them had agreed to MAMI’s proposal to organise digital screenings for their films, the view towards this was mixed.
In their statement, the organisers said that the online screenings were offered as an immediate solution for the filmmakers, and added that the films currently screening are “clocking significant viewership and media attention.”