Californian company to produce Bengali movies

kolkata: blazing the trail of professional funding of bengali movies for a global audience, a california-based company has decided to produce quality films for domestic and overseas audiences. the move, the first-ever such attempt to produce bengali movies in corporate style, emerged from "sound business sense of tapping the large worldwide market of such films and create bengali content for global audiences," the managing director of arjoe entertainment inc, arindam mukherjee said.arjoe entertainment is producing three bengali movies this year - pratighat, swapner feriwala and a film by eminent director buddhadeb dasgupta. the number will be raised to five or six next year, he said. swapner feriwala is the second film of subrata sen, of ek je ache kanya fame, while dasgupta's film will be all about journeys. "it may be journey of an animal, a person's journey for a goal, or a journey without a destination," dasgupta said without divulging the cast. a film by aparna sen will probably not begin before next year, mukherjee said. the movies to be produced by buddhadeb dasgupta and aparna sen would be budgeted within rs 50 lakh, he said. the ae's first production antarghat has been sent to the 'prabashi (overseas) film festival' in san francisco. "our immediate target is bengalis abroad and at home, the urbanite and semi-urbanite audiences of the metropolis. we are not targeting the people in mofussil areas where taste for entertainment and the new language of the mtv generation has not reached to that extent," mukherjee said. a corpus has been created for financing the films, mukherjee said but did not divulge the figures. he explained that besides the content value as unique sales proposition (usp), their product would lay stress on packaging as done by companies in the fast moving consumer goods (fmcg) category. the ae would first create a portfolio of bengali films and then move towards content sharing. "while we are corporatising the film production at present, we have plans to show films in our own centres, possibly multiplexes, in another three years," mukherjee said. asked how production aspects would be different from the production of individual producers, mukherjee said "besides the content richness, for us film is a commodity which has to be packaged well." while the venture will be the third attempt at corporatisation of films in the country after ab corp of amitabh bachchan and subhas ghai's mukta arts, mukherjee pointed out that budget-wise bengali movies were far behind the range of bollyood's average masala film.