The transnational tales of an Indian creative producer: the case of Guneet Monga

ABSTRACT

Studies of Indian cinema have traditionally placed more emphasis on directors, stars, aesthetics and issues of ideology than on the practices of creative producers. Although these are important concerns, the role of Indian producers deserves careful scholarly attention, especially in the context of transnational film projects, where producers are often involved from the pre-development stage through production and distribution. To address this problem, this article examines the production stories of an Indian creative producer, Guneet Monga (1983-), who is well-known for setting up Indian-European co-productions that deviate from contemporaneous spectacle-driven mainstream Bollywood productions. Through an in-depth personal interview with the producer herself and insights from film and media production studies, this article demonstrates how Monga’s micro-production stories reveal larger creative and collaborative practices that are transforming India’s independent film production culture and making it more transnational. This article shows that producers––the least researched figure in Indian film scholarship––gain several navigational tactics through transnational co-productions such as telling tales of tenacity, hustling and interpersonal networking, among others. These tactics, in turn, challenge the precarious conditions of working in the Bollywood-dominated film culture of India.

KEYWORDS:

• Producers
• transnational cinema
• production culture
• precarity
• international co-productions
• creative labour
• Indian independent cinema
• film festivals

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In addition to Monga, there are several other women director-producers who are shifting India’s film production culture by playing similar roles. For example, Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar established the production house Tiger Baby Films, in 2015 and since then have produced a number of transnational productions including Gully Boy (2019) – with Nas (noted American rapper, songwriter and entrepreneur) as the executive producer – which premiered in Berlin International film festival 2019 and was India’s official entry to the Oscars. Several others such as Rima Das, Rohena Gera, Leena Yadav and Shonali Bose have directed and produced independent films that have travelled through the international film festival circuit over the past decade.

2. Several other creative producers interviewed for this study such as Maathivanan Rajendran and Harsh Agarwal (Nasir, 2020), as well as Aditi Anand (The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir, 2018), among others are following similar paths in the industry.

3. The term was coined by Rajadhyaksha (2003) to denote the hegemonic position of Bollywood as an all-encompassing cultural industry due to globalization in the 1990s.

4. There have been similar female figures – such as the Seher Latif, Alankrita Shrivastava, Leena Yadav, Kalpana Lajmi, Ajita Suchitra Veera – who shared Monga’s background and worked in highly male-dominated production contexts in India.

5. There is a huge disparity in funding of independent film projects depending largely on the production companies backing the projects. Low-budget films can cost anywhere between 10 million to 20 million INR compare to average cost of Bollywood films range between 200 million and 500 million INR. Films with micro-budgets, which can have a budget below 10 million INR are generally funded outside Mumbai and its dominant Bollywood production structures.

6. The National Film Development Corporation (previously known as The Film Finance Corporation) – established in 1975 by the Government of India – not only provided financial support to artistic projects of the 1970s and 1980s but also produced, promoted, and distributed these films worldwide.

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Neha Bhatia

Neha Bhatia is a Ph.D. candidate in Transcultural Studies at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Her research focuses on India's independent film production culture and its transnational developments over the past decade. In 2021, she received Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship for outstanding academic achievement in graduate studies.