Audience's aversion towards festival films gone: Nagesh Kukunoor

Kolkata: Director Nagesh Kukunoor, whose "Dhanak" will be released this Friday, said the common audience's outlook towards festival films has changed over the years and they are not averse to such films.

"Directors like me in Bollywood are now more emboldened to time their films' commercial release after screening in the festival circuit. This is because the common audience is no more averse to films having festival tag," Kukunoor told PTI.

"Dhanak" has won the Grand Prix for best feature, given by the international jury in the generation KPlus section for children, as well as a special mention of the children's jury in the same section, at the Berlin Film Festival this year.

"Earlier distributors were hesitant to release festival screened films on a larger scale.

"But if you look at the release trends of our genre of cinema and how they were accepted by the general public, you will yourself understand the public perception has gone for a change-over," he said.

The 49-year-old "Iqbal" helmer said he believed children's film should get more support in India.

"With this era of commercialisation, we can't re-invent films like Satyajit Ray's 'Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne'. We should make present era films which can also weave magic and create a feel good effect for today's children," he said.

"Dhanak is a happy film which I did to remind myself the world is not an altogether bad place, a far cry from my previous directorial 'Lakshmi' which was a gut-wrenching story on trafficking," he said.

"'Dhanak,' a tale of two siblings on a magical quest, retains the flavour of 'Iqbal' in a way both films are brother-sister drama and are happy films overall," he said.

About directing movies on diverse subjects Kukunoor said, "I write films the way I know. I will put myself in that space. For instance if I develop a script on someone who is a 
killer, I will try to figure out why he is on a killing spree," he said.

The filmmaker also launched the novel version of "Dhanak," claimed to be the first Indian novelisation of a children's film. Earlier non-children films like "Bobby" and "Mera Naam Joker" had been rendered into novels.