Column | Why India’s recent Cannes glory is not just an occasion for celebration, but for introspection too

India's historic Cannes success sparks introspection on support for indie filmmakers and misplaced national pride.

Yes, we Cannes. That seemed to be the prevailing sentiment after India’s historic showing at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

Every year, India’s Cannes coverage typically follows a certain formula. First there’s a slew of photographs of Indian celebrities and quasi-celebs posing on the red carpet and a gush of reports about their outfits.

Then there’s a stream of finger-wagging articles bemoaning the fact that none of the red-carpetbaggers was there to promote actual films, that the world’s biggest film industry had again produced nothing that could be deemed Cannes-worthy.

Finally, someone shares an old photograph of Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil and Shyam Benegal at Cannes when Benegal’s Nishant (1975) was nominated for the Palme d’Or award and everyone wistfully sighs about the long-lost good old art-film days.

This year, India broke the jinx. The ‘nishant’ happened when Payal Kapadia took home the Grand Prix for her film All We Imagine As Light, and Anasuya Sengupta won the Un Certain Regard Best Actress prize for The Shameless. It led to widespread jubilation and social media celebration from Prime Minister Modi to Bollywood stars to former FTII chair Gajendra Chauhan.

But as many pointed out, it was a little ironic for Chauhan to “feel proud” that he was “chairman at the time when (Kapadia) was doing the course there” given that Kapadia is still fighting legal cases stemming from her involvement in months of protest against his appointment.

Chauhan, however, was an easy target for hypocrisy, a way to deflect attention from the rest of us. As filmmaker Anurag Kashyap said in an interview, India did not support these films. These “Indian” films were really French productions or self-funded or financed by the U.K. Film Lottery Fund. Even the Indo-French production is yet to receive its promised government rebate. Kashyap said Konstantin Bojanov, director of The Shameless, spent 10 years struggling with the film and chose Sengupta, an art director, as his lead after getting no interest from better-known actors. And the truth is, most Indians didn’t even know these films existed before they won their awards. We were too busy Googling influencer Nancy Tyagi and her DIY red-carpet outfits.