Fuss over India’s Oscar entry ‘Liar’s Dice’

A few Bollywood personalities have expressed their incredulity over Mohandas’ film – her debut effort as a director – being picked by by the Film Federation of India (FFI) over 29 other contenders that included the critically acclaimed Bollywood films Queen, Mary Kom and Shahid, and the Marathi-language drama Fandry.

A scene from the film Liar's Dice, India's entry to the Oscars next year.

"I've got no time for sour grapes," says the actress and director Geetu Mohandas, reacting to disappointment that her social drama, Liar's Dice, was chosen as India's entry for the 2015 Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Controversies erupt every year over India's choice for the Oscars, with filmmakers and sections of the public taking to social media to voice their dissent.

This year is no different. A few ­Bollywood personalities have expressed their incredulity that Mohandas's film – her debut effort as a director – was picked by the Film Federation of India (FFI) over 29 other contenders, including the critically acclaimed Bollywood films Queen, Mary Kom and Shahid, and the Marathi-­language drama ­Fandry.

With the exception of Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan (2001), which received an Oscar nomination, India has not come close to winning an Oscar. A record 83 countries have submitted titles for next year's foreign language film Oscar – seven more than the record set this year.

Having previously dabbled in Malayalam documentaries, Mohandas decided that her first full-length feature film – about the lives of migrant workers – would be in Hindi. Liar's Dice, she says, was conceived as a way to portray the lives of labourers who are "otherwise invisible".

“Migrants are just a number, a statistic, unless some crime involving them happens or some calamity. They are nameless people living far away from their families with no communication with them,” says Mohandas, who is also a popular actress in Malayalam cinema.

The movie, which Mohandas says she made on a low budget, is about “a man, a woman, a child and a goat”. It’s the story of a young mother, played by Geetanjali Thapa, who travels with her 3-year-old daughter and pet goat from a remote village on the Indian border with Tibet and China to find her husband, who had migrated to New Delhi in search of work. On the way, they meet an army deserter (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and find adventure and love during their travels.

The film, which has received high praise on the festival circuit in India and abroad, including at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, will only get a limited release in India next month and it is this lack of nationwide screenings that has fuelled the controversy.

"It's very odd to choose a film that hasn't even been seen by many Indians, never mind been a commercial success," says Nilesh Navlakha, the producer of Fandry, a film about caste-based discrimination.

Hansal Mehta, the director of Shahid, a biography of the Indian lawyer and human-rights activist Shahid Azmi, who was assassinated in 2010, has also been quoted in the press as being critical of the choice.

“The lack of transparency in the FFI’s selection process has also raised hackles,” says Mehta.

Apart from naming the chairman of the selection committee – the filmmaker T Hariharan – the identities of the 12 other members have not been revealed, effectively shrouding the whole selection process in secrecy.

The director Vinta Nanda says: "This method of selection is archaic, autocratic, dictatorial and needs to be dumped. The jury needs to give reasons for why they think Liar's Dice is better than all the others."

Mohandas refuses to say much about the controversy because she does not want “negative feelings to affect a film into which she has poured so much passion”, but stresses that the FFI has presumably chosen a film on merit rather than on the ‘’volume of release”. She also says the lack of a national release should not work against the film.

“If we have not had an all-India release it’s because we don’t have a big production house to do the marketing. It was a deliberate decision based on our wishes and strategy. Surely how we market the film – whether we release it in one go or in stages – is our choice?” she says.

As for screening it in the UAE, Mohandas says she would like to show it in Abu Dhabi or Dubai but has not yet received an invitation to do so.

The industry analyst Komal Nahta says she's not very optimistic about Liar's Dice nor about its chances at the Academy Awards.

"Everyone gets worked up and excited, along with the routine controversy," says Nahta. "The whole thing is just a formality because, with the exception of Lagaan which got close, we have never stood a chance. Once it's been nominated, everyone forgets about it – until the next year."

The nominations for the 2015 Academy Awards will be announced on January 15, while the awards cere­mony will be held on February 22.