The Freedom For Cinematic Creativity

I’d define ‘cinematic creativity’ as the vision for storytelling scripted by the filmmakers in context with the purposes of delivering content of entertainment value or the likes. In that sense, there are multiple reasons why movies in India, one of the largest movie industries in the world, do not get released in the cinemas, while most of them get heavily censored — meaning the so-called offensive scenes and dialogues are sliced by the CBFC and the original content is pruned to make it more viewer-friendly, so to speak. In short, what you eventually see on the big screen is not what the makers intended to showcase for the public. At times, the trailers depict one thing while the final cut of the movie does not have the scenes or the dialogues from the trailer which is disappointing! Luckily, nothing of that sort happened with ‘Sacred Games’ thanks to a platform like Netflix. Clearly, the likes of Netflix are not just an instance of a digital platform for streaming of original content, it’s an ecosystem for cinematic creativity and storytelling for filmmakers of any scale. It’s quite practical, that an underworld epic like the ‘Sacred Games’ would have been completely stripped off of its originality had it been released in the theatres in India, that lesson was bearing heavily on my mind as I was awed by the profanities in the script, albeit, it never seemed unwarranted or thrust upon us merely for its darker content. This is also an opportunity for a deserving sequel to a fully Indian-made series, what the magnificent Powder couldn’t achieve. Then again, unlike some other movies, there are those with a good content value which could never release in India for lack of a distributor which got a voice on this platform. ‘Sacred Games’ was brilliant, but I’d also say, “Viva, Netflix!”