After the theatrical release of his documentary Fire In The Blood, Dylan Mohan Gray is working with friend Vikramaditya Motwane on a fiction script. He shared details with Divya Kaushik
A day before his documentary’s theatrical release Dylan Mohan Gray sounded like a contended man.
His film Fire In The Blood recently won the prize for political film at Filmfest Hamburg. The film earlier won the 2013 DOXA Feature Documentary Award at Vancouver and the 2013 Justice Matters Award at the 27th Washington DC International Film Festival. It was also chosen as an official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
But more than the awards the director is happy about the fact that people are appreciating the concept and it will probably be the first documentary to have its theatrical release. No doubt, content is ruling the silver screen.
Dylan says that at a time when most of the theatrical releases have grand promotions, it was difficult to plan a promotional strategy for his film that talks about the role played by pharmaceutical companies in banning low-cost AIDS drugs to millions of the Global South’s poor in the 1990s. Dylan calls it as a “crime of the century” and his idea of screenings films at multiple festivals was to make more people aware.
“I am glad that word of mouth helped in promoting this film. When I made the film, I never considered the commercial aspect to the story. The only thing in my mind was to make the movie available to maximum people,” he said.
India is a big market and he says that problems faced by him were similar to the problems faced by other indie filmmakers in India.
“One thing I was always sure about was the subject of the film. It is very interesting and the story is woven with a lot of facts, information and it is visually appealing. So I think all this helped in making inroads to people’s hearts. I think today audience choice is governed by the content and I was sure that after knowing about the film they will be interested in watching it. The film is spoken a lot about on the social media and in the international circuit. In India I avoided too many screenings of the film as I wanted to keep alive the buzz and excitement here for the theatrical release,” he said.
The director is now working on a script with his friend Vikramaditya Motwane. “It is a fiction film and we have been working on a script for long. We will start making the film early next year. I have been friends with Vikramaditya since last 15 years,” he shared.