The 14th edition of the IFP (formerly India Film Project) festival will be held in Mumbai on October 12 and 13. There is an impressive lineup of attendees, including actors like Ratna Pathak Shah, Naseeruddin Shah, Taapsee Pannu, Aditi Rao Hydari, and filmmakers like Shoojit Sircar, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and Chaitanya Tamhane, to name a few. Another notable aspect of the festival is that it marks Hollywood actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt's first visit to India. Gordon-Levitt will attend the festival’s opening session. He will be in conversation with actor Rajkummar Rao on “Mastering the Art of Embodying a Character” and will also talk about HitRecord, an online collaborative media platform founded by him, under which he produced his debut directorial, the 2013 rom-com Don Jon.
In a conversation with CE, IFP founder Ritam Bhatnagar said that his team had reached out to the Hollywood actor last year as well but things didn’t fall into place. This time, however, Joseph responded to the cold email within 15 minutes. “He was aware of IFP because it’s similar to what he has been trying to build with HitRecord.” The conversation over mail led to a call with the actor at 2 am (IST). “I saw Joseph's mail and woke up Gaurav (Dave, Festival Producer) to get on the call. He had already confirmed in the mail so when things were landing on the call, we kind of knew that he was going to fly down.”
IFP was initiated as the Ahmedabad Film Project back in 2011. The seed for it, however, was sown in Ritam’s mind a year before when he stayed in Mumbai’s Andheri, sharing a flat with three film school students and an assistant director. “They were planning to make a film and sometimes 20 or more people used to come into our apartment for a script narration. Everything from the actors, to the director, even the scratch songs were figured out. And this was for a short film, but it never materialised. It kind of stayed with me.”
Ritam later shifted to Ahmedabad and worked on a project called ‘Touring Talkies’, as a part of which he and his team screened films in remote villages in Gujarat. This project, however, was to be put on pause during monsoon. “I had an office on rent and two interns and for three months there was nothing to do. One evening we thought of doing something that gets people together to make a film. We called it Ahmedabad Film Project. Initially, we thought of giving people ten days to make a film, then during the discussion the time frame came down to 50 hours.” This gave birth to IFP’s USP: the 50-hour challenge in which creators get the designated time to make something, usually on a theme given by the festival producers. The competition started out with filmmaking but now has expanded to fields of writing, music, photography, design and the preforming arts. “The first session of IFP started out as a hobby but then people called us asking when the second one was happening. We knew that if we do it for the second time, the third and subsequent segments were inevitable,” says Ritam.
By the third session, the initiative was renamed to India Film Project. It soon shifted base to Mumbai and eventually became just IFP, since it wasn’t limited to cinema anymore. “I believe what makes humans different from other species is their ability to create. But most of us have become just consumers. 99.99 per cent of people consume content made by the rest 0.001 per cent,” says Ritam. “It needs to change. IFP is a festival for everyone who has the urge to create.”