Online festivals were always an option, but no one thought about it: NYIFF director Aseem Chhabra

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the twentieth edition of the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) will be going virtual from Friday 24 July till Sunday 2 August.

During these 10 days, the festival will screen more than 40 features, documentaries and short films from India in different languages.

The opening film at the festival is Geetha J’s debut fiction feature Run Kalyani (2019). The screening will be followed by a Q&A session where distinguished parliamentarian and writer Shashi Tharoor in conversation with Geetha J.

The closing film of the festival will be another Malayalam film, Geetu Mohandas’s Moothon (2020).

The centrepiece films are two documentaries, Vibha Bakshi’s National award-winning Son Rise and Tanuja Chandra’s Aunty Sudha Aunty Radha.

The festival is presented by the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) and is held in Manhattan every year. The virtual festival this year will be held with the original slate of films programmed for this year.

Festival director Aseem Chhabra said, “By February, we had selected all the films that we wanted to show. Then in early March it became evident that the situation in New York will only get worse and people will not go to movie theatres. At that time, we announced that we will do the festival six months later, hoping that [things would improve] by that time, but we now know it’s getting worse and worse in many parts of the world.

"In May, I got slightly encouraged because there is a South Asian festival in Austin [in Texas] and another South Asian festival in Dallas [also in Texas] that were holding their festivals and something virtual was being done. At which point we said that why shouldn’t we do a virtual festival now because there is no guarantee when theatres will open and we had already selected the films

"Otherwise we would lose a year and this is our twentieth anniversary, so we had to do something to mark it.”

The NYIFF has collaborated with the video-on-demand (VOD) platform MovieSaints that is an online box office for independent films.

Speaking about the collaboration, Chhabra said, “I know the [CEO and] founder of MovieSaints, Rishi Raj, and Anupama Bose, the COO. So, there was a trust factor. They also have two of Bhaskar Hazarika’s films, Kothanodi (2015) and Aamis (2019), a couple of films by Sanal Sasidharan, and if these filmmakers felt comfortable going on the Movie Saints platform, I decided to go as well.

"One of the very big concerns with an online film festival relates to piracy and MovieSaints has assured us that they have a very stringent anti-piracy process set up and that was very important.”

As more and more festivals across the world look at virtual platforms. one wonders whether this will replace or, at the very least, supplement the ways in which festivals are conducted. Chhabra responded, “We don’t know what next year is going to be like, but one thing we know for sure is that in case theatres do open up, by next summer, April-May, we can still do a virtual festival for people who don’t come to New York.

"These guys [MovieSaints] can do geo-blocking by ZIP code and regions, so we can still show films to people in California, Illinois, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts and even outside, even in India."

Chhabra said this could have been done earlier as well, "but nobody thought about it before the pandemic. There was always an option to do online festivals, but nobody even thought about it because we were all excited about the actual, physical festival. But the pandemic has made us rethink in that sense at least.”

While the entire selection of films at NYIFF will not be available for Indian audiences on MovieSaints, the short films, five feature fiction films and two documentaries will be available.