At the recently concluded FICCI Frames 2023 Ratna Pathak Shah, Renuka Shahane, Swwapnil Joshi and Manasi Parekh shared their thoughts on how regional cinema needs to hold its own amidst the current pan-India cinema wave during the session ‘One Nation: Many Cinematic Voices’. As they spoke about the survival of films from various languages across India, Renuka stressed on the constant competition Marathi cinema has faced over the years.

She said, “We have yet not really cracked the code of competition with Hindi or Hollywood films, which are released in Maharashtra. I think as an industry, we have not been able to crack the viability code because if we have to dream any further, then we have to crack that within our own state first before we experiment with audiences all over India.”

Marathi films, too, have excelled at the box office and made noise, but Renuka pointed out that the pace has been quite sluggish. The actress feels that Marathi cinema faces a lot of competition and the industry should come together to find a solution.

She elaborated, “Films like Me Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy broke records, and Sairat did exceedingly well. But these are exceptions, how do we make these exceptions a rule is a question. The industry must come together and find a solution for it. I think we need a paradigm shift in the way we exhibit and distribute films because there has to be space for experimentation, which is not in direct competition with the rates of commercial Hindi, Telugu or Tamil films, otherwise, our films are never going to cross that barrier. If we are constantly faced with that competition of viability, we just do not have the theatres where our films will be released or subsidized over a period.”

We have ample and diverse stories to tell from across the length and breadth of our country. In such a scenario, Ratna believes that there’s no need to focus only on pan-Indian films. Sharing her, she said, “Today, kids in their teens pick up a camera and make something. So, there’s that enormous change in the accessibility to resources. There are cheaper resources available to make any kind of content on social media. All these things have led to different kinds of content being acceptable to different audiences. Our mistake is that we keep imagining that everything should be acceptable to everyone. Today, pan-Indian films are our big attempt. Everything cannot be pan-India!”

She added, “There’s a new audience now, which wants more of their own lives reflected in what they see. I think that’s the big difference. The audience doesn’t want only fantasy. They know that life is tough, and they want to see some reflection of that, so I think that is another big change. We are becoming aware that India is more than just a small band of people and a small band of ideas. That wonderful diversity of India, which I am so proud of and which we have read about in school books forever, is something we have genuinely managed to preserve over 5,000 years of civilization. We have kept our differences, isn’t that wonderful? But today, we are busy trying to homogenize and movies have played a part in that.”