Leena Yadav interview: We can’t run OTT and theatres against each other
(Originally published in The Hindu on December 21, 2023)
The feeling I remember from my conversation with filmmaker Leena Yadav is a constant oscillation between utter ease and extreme nervousness. Sitting with us at the Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival 2023 in Guwahati, Assam, Leena is as candid as ever, but this is a filmmaker who made the breathtaking Parched! To her credit, the conversation would put any film lover at ease; it flows between her thoughts on post-pandemic cinema, the evolution of queer cinema, to her experiments with format and her favourite titles from recent times (Past Lives and The Fall of the House of Usher).
Firstly, Leena is elated with her first-ever visit to the BVFF. “This is a community of passionate people who truly support cinema,” she says. Who better than Leena to speak about the culture of film festivals? Parched premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival while her Rajma Chawal premiered at the 2018 BFI London Film Festival. One would assume that the changes the pandemic brought to the larger narrative in mainstream cinema would trickle down and affect the sense of community that film festivals offer. Leena, however, believes that the community and the culture have come back with more purpose. “Priority shifts have happened to all of us in our lives — which will be more visible in a few years when we are fully reeled out of the shock — but why we are doing what we are doing with film festivals has become clearer.”
In our conversation with BVFF’s Festival Director, Tanushree Hazarika, she said that streaming platforms are helping indie films or small films that play at festivals get wider reach; Leena agrees. “A lot of these films used to disappear after the festival. Television was completely driven by theatrical success but not OTT; so even if they have a niche audience, they are still available online.” Having transitioned from an ad filmmaker to a television director to a feature filmmaker and a documentary filmmaker/series creator, Leena has seen cinema transition across mediums. While she agrees that OTT has not democratised all of cinema and that the star system is very much alive, she stresses it has given rise to…
Read the full interview here: