All state varsities to have film societies

The International Film Festival in Nagpur (IFFN) got under way on Friday, and no sooner had it begun than good news about the promotion
and spread of cinema in some of the remote parts of the state began pouring in. Sudhir Nandgaonkar, the general secretary of the Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI), informed that talks were under way to set up a campus film society at the Sant Gadgebaba Amravati University for quite some time now. The status for such a film society, if any, at Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University, is not known.

Nandgaonkar told TOI that there three universities in Maharashtra already had a campus film society. "These are the Ramanand Vidyapeeth in Nanded, the Marathwada Vidyapeeth in Aurangabad and the Shivaji University in Kolhapur. In another five years, we plan to open such societies in all state universities," he informed.

Nandgaonkar said, since 1952, the government of India was spending crores of rupees for development of cinema in country. However, the results were not up to the mark, because the efforts had not percolated down to the level of the common man. "Hence we decided to go beyond metropolitan cities and reach out to youth in smaller places," he said.

While solves the problem of bringing cinema to the masses, but what of bringing the language of masses to the media? "It is unfortunate that no Hindi-speaking region actually produces Hindi films. That onus seems to have fallen upon Mumbai. That is the reason why Marathi films suffered," Nandgaonkar said.

"In the past few years, TV has eaten away at monopoly of Hindi cinema, and the vacuum created has been filled up to some extent by Marathi films. Add to that the facts that all Marathi films are exempted from tax, and that Marathi film-makers are entitled to Rs 20 lakh government grant for his second film, and the results are very optimistic. At a point of time about two decades ago, there were only 10 to 20 Marathi films released in a year. Compare that to the 110 Marathi films cleared by the censor board for release in 2008 alone," he beams.