“They (Farooq Shaikh and Shabana Azmi, the lead pair) have done 500 shows of Tumhari Amrita but there isn’t a single recording anywhere. The death of veteran actor Farooq Shaikh in December squashed any last traces of doubt in her mind. Photo: Dinesh Parab/Mintīy and by, Das bought into the intent of documenting performances for posterity and taking these plays to audiences beyond the urban, upper middle class set. View Full Image Co-founders Subodh Maskara and Nandita Das reviewing posters for some cineplays at their Mumbai home. That’s what sparked the idea of cineplays-they would film the play and organize screenings when they couldn’t travel for a live show. Maskara started thinking about how he could take his stage play to more performance venues and festivals despite the constraints. Any fewer shows and it wouldn’t have made financial sense to go," he says. “A 40-show tour in the US would have meant at least 12 weekends of packed travel and performance schedules. Maskara and Das had to turn some of them down, including a US tour. There were offers to perform Between The Lines abroad. In 2012, Das directed her first theatre production and Maskara made his acting debut in Between The Lines. Das thought Chhoti Production would enable her to work on more directorial projects. Maskara, who had by then become chairman of Polygenta (he left in 2013), hoped this venture would allow him to spend more time with his newborn. That same year, Maskara and Das, now 44, launched Chhoti Production Co., their film and theatre venture. The evening went so well that the couple were soon married and a year later, in 2010, their son, Vihaan, was born. None of it seemed at all likely, till he went on a blind date in August 2009 with actor Nandita Das. In 2002, he began an eight-year stint as managing director of Polygenta Technologies Ltd, a company co-founded by his father, Santosh, in the 1980s it now recycles plastic soft-drink bottles to make polyester yarn. For instance, our content is being shown on 13 September in the US at the Washington DC South Asian Film Festival.”ĬinePlay is also launching its own Video On Demand channel in about a month “as there is a lot of interest and potential growth in VoD and other digital platforms for our content.That is, he could not envisage this life while he was doing a master’s in business administration at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, US, in the mid-1990s, or even when he was struggling to launch a number of start-ups, from an events management company to a white goods firm (“A lot of them didn’t do well, to be honest," he says). In terms of its global appeal, Maskara thinks “there is a huge market overseas starting with the diaspora. CinePlay has hosted ticketed screenings at cultural venues – instead of cinemas – such as Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts and Delhi’s India Habitat Centre. In addition to Between The Lines, other productions include iconic Hindi play Adhe Adhure (which has been staged since the sixties) and Dance Like A Man. We wanted to do specially filmed versions with the right lighting and sound while still preserving the live experience.”ĬinePlay has produced five plays so far and has fifteen productions in the pipeline. Maskara also says that while he had seen some international references of recorded versions of plays, “I never found them engaging since they were mostly recordings of a live performance for an audience. STORY Study Abroad: The Top 15 International Film Schools “That got me thinking about doing a specially filmed version of the play so that it could be shared with a wider audience.” “We had about 40 house full shows and had requests for another 30 or so performances but due to various logistical reasons, we couldn’t do more shows,” Maskara – who has a background as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor – told The Hollywood Reporter. The idea came into being when Maskara and Das co-starred in their 2012 English play Between The Lines which revolved around a lawyer couple who end up arguing on opposite sides of a criminal trial, blurring their personal and professional lives. Future plans include marketing the concept via digital and other platforms to target a global audience. Co-founded by actress and former Cannes jury member Nandita Das and her husband Subodh Maskara, CinePlay has produced specially filmed versions of plays and screened them at cultural venues in Mumbai and Delhi. CinePlay is a recently launched Mumbai-based first of a kind venture that blends the live theater experience with cinema.
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