Actor Kunal Kapoor, who along with Varun Sheth cofounded crowd-funding platform Ketto, has been busy attending regional film festivals at Vishakhapatnam , Kolkata and Kerala. “We are trying to educate regional language movie-makers about this avenue of fund-raising,” said Sheth, Chief Executive at Ketto who is set to launch two funding campaigns on the platform shortly, one in Marathi and the other in Malayalam.

Regional movies are the buzz at crowd-funding startup Wishberry as well. It has two Bengali movies seeking funds — ‘Call of the Open Road’ and ‘Friday Night Originals’ — and three more will be up on it soon — ‘Yatharth,’ ‘Pyari Dulhaniya’ and ‘Kojagori.’

Movies have been a hot favourite on Indian crowd-funding platforms, where creative and social projects typically make the most impact. Since 2012, Wishberry has held 66 crowd-funding campaigns under the film genre, which is 28% of its total projects, the highest.

Crowd-funding startups like Ketto and Wishberry are increasingly turning to regional language movies — not including mainstream Bollywood or Hindi films here — as a way to expand the scope of their offerings. Also, movies in Marathi, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam and other regional languages are emerging exceedingly strong in content, and crowd-funding the world over is known to work best for exceptional and unique ideas.

“Regional filmmakers are much more daring with their subject matters and so is the audience. If you look at Marathi, Tamil, Kannada films, even Bengali films, are seeing a bit of a revival,” said Movie Director Vikramaditya Motwane, an investor in Wishberry. “In that sense it’s a great move for crowd-funding ventures to look at regional movies. It can also be a great push to local cinema, for which production costs are cheaper, normally .`80-90 lakh or.`1-2 crore.

Wishberry, last year, helped fund Rs 41 lakh for Sanskrit animated movie Punyakoti, based on a Tamil folklore. In 2013, Kannada thriller Lucia set a precedent becoming the first crowd-funded regional film to raise Rs 51lakh in 31days.

“Most region-specific funding is happening due to a strong sense of patriotism for the region than the topic itself,” said Anshulika Dubey, Chief Operating officer at Wishberry, which aims to help fund 10-15 regional movies this year. Dubey finds Marathi cinema sufficiently good to bet on. Regional movie makers can expect to raise Rs 20-50 lakh on crowd-funding platforms, according to industry experts.

However, movies backed by crowdfunding face distribution challenges since in regions such as West Bengal this is tightly controlled by industry insiders.

Source: The Economic Times