The Azim Premji Foundation, best known for its work in education and health, is turning to cinema as another way of engaging with Indian society, bringing filmmakers, including Shaunak Sen and Varun Grover, into a new film initiative focused on socially conscious storytelling.
The films it has backed are varied. In one, fans of a forgotten thumri singer raise money for her treatment at a government hospital on the condition that she does an encore of her iconic performance from decades ago at a concert with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. In another, an atheistic, no-nonsense surgeon faces an ethical dilemma when a dying patient’s final wish requires him to read verses from a religious scripture. Elsewhere, the line between work and home blurs for a community health worker with an autistic daughter, while a group of girls from difficult backgrounds find liberation through football.
These four shorts — two fiction films and two documentaries — Kambakhat by Varun Grover, The Last Rites by Zoya Parvin, Laiba Ka Ghar by Archana Phadke and Khelne Chalogi? by Garima Sadhwani — played as a package at the recently concluded Bengaluru International Short Film Festival (BISFF) at Suchitra Film Society, the more-than-50-year-old film club.
The August 15 screening was an apt setting for the films. They were conceived under the banner of Janato Cinema, a new initiative by the Azim Premji Foundation, named after Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite song, which has set out to make socially conscious cinema inspired by the values enshrined in the Constitution of India. The packed auditorium suggested there is an audience for such films. The more interesting question is whether Janato can help build one at scale.
The First Slate
The four films are part of a larger slate developed over the past 16 months. Next up is Shaunak Sen’s Termite — the Oscar-nominated filmmaker’s first attempt at fiction after the acclaimed documentary All That Breathes — which will premiere in the Short Cuts programme at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Janato has started with short films, bringing together filmmakers including Rohin Raveendran Nair, whose earlier work includes The Booth, as well as directing an episode of Black Warrant.
Narayan Krishnaswamy, head of art and culture at the Foundation, emphasises that the initiative is not interested in making films that feel like lectures.
“If you become very literal with constitutional values, exactly two people will watch your film,” he says. “We are trying to get behind emotions like empathy and harmony, while people continue to remain hooked to the story we are telling. We are looking for that potent mix: an entertainment product with a social heart.”
Finding A Story
The idea grew out of the Foundation’s more recent move into art and culture, following its work in areas such as education and health and subsequent ventures into radio and music.
“We believe that a good story can change society,” Krishnaswamy says.
When he began exploring the possibility of making films, he approached Grover, who in turn brought in Parvin, whom he knew from their time working on Sacred Games. Together, they began developing four films around an overarching theme.
The original idea was to set the stories in a highway, school or hospital. They eventually chose the hospital because it was more logistically convenient and potentially more cinematic. Thus was born Ilaajghar, an anthology of which two films that played at BISFF. Two more, Ambiecka Pandit’s 21 and Faraz Ali’s 25, are yet to be shown publicly.
“These films are about dignity when you are vulnerable,” Grover says, “which is a theme very relevant to India today, where the vulnerable are getting the least amount of dignity and space to be themselves.”
The slate expanded from there, with production company Gubbara Entertainment approaching Krishnaswamy, leading to filmmakers including Sen, Phadke and Nair coming on board.
Beyond Funding
Alongside its slate, they are also looking to nurture emerging filmmakers through a fellowship. It has assembled an in-house team, including graduates of the Film and Television Institute of India, with the longer-term ambition of developing and producing films internally.
“We should not become only producers,” Krishnaswamy says. “We should make our own stuff.”
That distinction matters in a film landscape where filmmakers across formats struggle to find funding, while short films in particular face a dearth of platforms. Filmmakers involved see a gap that the initiative could potentially fill.
Sen describes that gap as “a gaping, yawning, giant” one. He points to international models such as documentary financier Impact Partners and the now-defunct Participant Media, which directed capital towards socially conscious, formally ambitious cinema while attempting to balance commercial considerations with social impact.
In India, where infrastructure for independent cinema remains limited, he sees philanthropic backing as particularly valuable.
“The fact that this is philanthropy that is bolstering the production means that it’s not automatically geared towards more mercenary, pragmatic interests,” Sen says. “Their headline is not how much money it will make, and therefore it kind of shifts the gaze onto other questions of theme and excellence in terms of form. And the truth is that this is something that we’ve kind of been missing in India.”
Grover makes a similar argument but frames it as an infrastructure problem. He compares the absence of sustained spaces for art to walking through a city and finding no hardware shops: you may not notice their importance while they exist, but you would realise something was missing if they disappeared.
Corporate and philanthropic funding, he argues, tends to prioritise urgent needs such as health, education and childcare, while art and cinema are treated as things that can wait. But art, he says, is fundamental to how society understands ideas such as equality and dignity.
“You don’t miss them because they are there,” he says of artistic spaces, but they are “equally important” to the world.
Stories On Ground
For Phadke, who made Laiba Ka Ghar along with three other documentaries for Janato, the appeal was not simply access to funding but access to stories. She got the opportunity to meet people who subsequently became subjects of her films.
Krishnaswamy describes the Foundation as sitting on a “mine of stories”, with its work and that of its partners taking it into almost every district of India.
He believes Janato can tap that network by taking filmmakers to the ground and allowing them to find stories that might otherwise remain unseen.
For Phadke, the experience offered the freedom to approach those stories on her own terms. “These stories don’t have to become a ‘social issue film’. They can just be films,” she says. “They can have humour, intimacy, contradictions and complexity.” The process, she adds, also expanded her own understanding of the world, giving her “the space to discover something I didn’t already know”.
The Audience Test
Janato is taking a deliberately incremental approach, with larger investments contingent on the films demonstrating that they can find audiences. For the Foundation, then, success cannot simply mean festival acclaim or appreciation within the film industry.
“We have to show public results,” Krishnaswamy says. That makes distribution the next test.
The films will travel the festival circuit, but they also plan to build a YouTube channel and eventually take the films into public spaces, including schools and venues in smaller towns and rural areas where the Foundation already has a presence. The ambition is to discover whether films made with a social purpose can travel beyond the familiar ecosystem of festivals and film circles.
That is perhaps where Janato’s experiment becomes most interesting. There is no shortage of filmmakers in India with stories to tell, nor of audiences willing to seek out independent cinema. What is scarce is the infrastructure connecting the two.
Whether Janato can build that bridge — rather than simply fund another slate of films that circulate within the existing ecosystem — will determine the initiative’s real impact.