Toronto: In an unusual and interesting move, the ongoing 31st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has clubbed four top Bollywood personalities with two of the world's most unconventional filmmakers, the feisty American Michael Moore and Hollywood rules-breaker John Waters.
Megastars Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, actress Rani Mukerjee and director Karan Johar, who are in Toronto for the gala presentation screening of Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (KANK), will field questions at an up close and personal interaction with interviewer Suketu Mehta and a live audience in a festival sidebar titled Mavericks.
The four Bollywood invitees will hold forth on the mysteries of 'The making of a Bollywood blockbuster', a genre that, for the rest of the world, still clearly belongs to an indefinable space.
The move to include Karan Johar and his KANK cast in a section called Mavericks clearly stems from an idea that probably germinated a few years ago when the Cannes Film Festival rolled out its red carpet to Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas.
It also, in a sense, points to the fact that Mumbai cinema, with all its colour and drama and the global resultant media attention, continues to baffle the world even as it fascinates certain sections of movie buffs on the festival circuit.
The appellation Mavericks rightfully belongs to more cutting-edge filmmakers, craftsmen who use the medium to constantly push the envelope of creativity. But when it is extended to include a Bollywood director, it creates interesting marketing possibilities.
Is that the way Mumbai moviemakers should also begin looking at themselves and their work and promote the package on a global scale as cinematic products of an imagination that is peculiarly their own?
Interestingly, yet another American filmmaker blessed with a strongly rebellious streak, John Cameron Mitchell, will conduct the Michael Moore and John Waters 'live' interviews in this year's Mavericks section.
Mitchell is the man who crafted Shortbus, a sexually explicit film that pushes the boundaries of erotica as far as is possible without lapsing into outright pornography.
The film screens in TIFF this year in a new section, Vanguard, which will showcase films that eschew safe forms of cinematic expression in search of newer, more provocative modes.
So, will we ever see a Bollywood flick here?
Shortbus, which was screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, is set in a New York salon where a host of characters indulge in or watch others indulge in sexual free play as a means to drowning out their fears and agonies.
Neither Fahrenheit 9/11 nor Shortbus or any of the eccentric films helmed by John Waters have anything in common with Karan Johar's three-and-a-half-hour long exploration of marital discord among four well-off Indian characters in New York.
But such are the ways of international film festivals and so small is the movie world gradually becoming that it is increasingly possible for peddlers of conventional Bollywood fare to rub shoulders with infinitely more unconventional craftsmen from around the world.
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