CFSI scouts for global markets to promote children's films

Mumbai: The Children's Film Society of India (CFSI) has started exploring different avenues like participating in international film festivals to market and distribute the children's movies produced by, which could also help it earn more revenue.

"After successfully marketing children's films in the domestic market through many theatrical releases and school outreach programmes, we now want to explore the possibility of marketing Indian children's films abroad by participating in the European Film Market," CEO Dr Shravan Kumar told PTI over phone from Germany, where he is participating in the Berlin Film Festival.

At the Berlin Film Festival in 2012, CFSI film 'Gattu' was given a Special Mention by International Jury, he said.

"For 'Gattu', we undertook innovative marketing and distribution initiative like tie-up with PVR for school shows and generated revenues for CFSI through international screenings and sale of home video rights, world sales rights, domestic theatrical distribution rights and exclusive cable TV and Pay TV rights abroad, etc," added Kumar.

In the recent past, CFSI has successfully undertaken commercial release of many children's films in India. 'Gattu' was the first commercially-released film of CFSI. Marketing and promotion was one of the biggest mechanism which created a buzz for 'Gattu'.

Unlike China, Netherlands and Denmark, India does not focus on children's cinema, but CFSI, with all its expertise in children cinema, released 'Gattu' in 2012 among the highly marketed commercial cinema.

"It was this festival (Berlin Film Festival) that recognised 'Gattu' three years back and today I am here to explore more avenues for marketing children's films that are produced by CFSI," Kumar said.
CFSI has been making films for Indian market since its inception and this would be a collective effort to reach market internationally and make much better cinema which would be entertaining as well as educative, he said.