This project of passion got filmmakers and KidzCinema noticed in one-third of the whole world

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today I'm delighted to introduce Praveen Nagda, who is the festival director for Kids Cinema 2021, joining me from Mumbai. Praveen, welcome.

Hi, Jim. How are you?

I'm well. And look, it's lovely to have a conversation with you. You and I know each other because of your Peregrine PR agency work in India, but you're an entrepreneur and I I'm going to ask you how you're helping other entrepreneurs get noticed. And I think specifically filmmaker entrepreneurs.

Sure. So it's an interesting topic that you'd like to hear and people would like to know a little bit what we've been doing here. In this case, COVID presented one good opportunity to us in 2020. Whole world was locked down. Kids were sitting at home. Families were living in the closed spaces, couldn't get out. And people were, you know, switching on to online media consumption like never before. At the same time, kids were also suffering a lot emotionally because they've always been used to playgrounds, friends, moving out of home. I have my own kid, 10-year-old, 9-year-old. He was 8-year-old 2 years back. So I could see him so restricted and so feeling so much feeling of claustrophobia in home because He would always be out with his friends, 5 to 7 hours a day he would be out. And this is the same thing which was happening around the world with many of my friends, whether it's America or India or Europe, all of us had that experience. Also, that was one angle. And second angle was COVID also provided a lot of challenges to us in our traditional businesses that we were doing. So one also was constantly exploring some new opportunities, some new avenues. So we thought, why don't we do something which is an act of passion also, which becomes a long-term mission for me personally at the same time, also brings in some kind of additional business opportunities that we can look at. So we planned to create online film festival for children. Film festivals are there, kids film festivals, not too many of them. India has a few of them. Europe has a lot of them, but again, each country will have one or two of them. Kids need very wholesome, healthy entertainment. They can learn a lot of things, get value, education, life lessons. All those things are very important. And typically in the world over, there are not so many children's films are made as compared to the films for adults. You have Hollywood and Bollywood everywhere, but for children, you don't have so many films. Of course, the European market is pretty much evolved. There are a lot of, you know, running film festivals for children for 30 and 40 years, and it is still evolved. But India still is evolving. We had few good film festivals for children, but not many of them. Now online was an opportunity that one could encash, and therefore we decided to create the property which was around kids. Now film festivals gives a lot of opportunities to filmmakers to exhibit. Releasing a film theatrically, it's On big, big, big expense. Many people don't even have those capabilities. Reaching out to theaters and exhibiting is a humongous task. So festivals give this opportunity to a lot of filmmakers where they can showcase their work at probably free of cost or very minimal cost in terms of the fee or something. In case of kids films, we don't charge any entry fee from the filmmakers. We let them submit their films. Of course, we take films which are the recent ones in the last 1 year's time made films. So first edition, we also approached at that time UNESCO India office and they were very kind. So they helped us connecting with people, reaching out to many constituents. We also connected with many embassies in India and extended our outreach. It was interesting to note that the first ever Film Festival, first edition of Kids Cinema, received about 1,100 films and they came from 87 countries, which is pretty good. One-third of the whole world participated. And next year, the second edition that we celebrated this year had about 1,500+ films from 90+ countries. So which, which means what? It's so overwhelming that, you know, you see one-third of the world is actually coming together and joining towards this cause. And these films came from filmmakers living in remote area, remote, small countries from Africa, very small islands from different places, a number of films from Europe, a lot of films from Iran. There are countries which have sanctions, there are countries which have, you know, economic conditions don't allow this kind of culture which is there to grow. And still we got a huge participation. We, in the second edition, we partnered with the organization called FILM, which is again one of the world's largest organizations of people, filmmakers who are making content for children. So it has got members from 40, 45 countries, hundreds of people, established filmmakers who have made films, documentaries, dramas for the children, animation films for children. We had live-action films, we had animation films, and we also had one very unique category where we took films made by children. So in the age group of 8, 6 to 20, there were 2 categories. 6 to 13 was one category, 14 to 20 was another category. And we got hundreds of people from all over the world. Amazing amount of creativity you can see there. What kind of beautiful animation films, small stories, large stories. very interesting creative work from children. Films is a universal medium. It can bind people, you know, it doesn't even require audio. You can, you can see kids watching films without audio, and they'll understand what's happening there. It's a very powerful tool of communication. And we experienced it, we found that, and it was a pretty overwhelming experience for us to really connect the whole world together. Last year, when the first edition was, a lot of learning for us, it was the beginning of a Very mammoth task with that. We, we also did not believe how it will unfold because when we started the festival, we didn't really know how many entries we'll get, how many participations we will get. And we started and finished within about 52 days, the first edition. Every day we used to get 50-odd entries from different countries. It was so overwhelming that, you know, we had to constantly add more people at that time who are in the process of curation because We have to make sure that we see each film. So there was a 10-12 member curation team who see each film and evaluate it on certain parameters and clear it for the next process of the selection committee, which again would be a part of filmmakers, good, well-known, experienced filmmakers. We form the committee, they will go through it. And from there, the next step would be for the jury members. Some would be from Bollywood, some senior bureaucrats. So we had a very mix of interesting jury. And they finally awarded the best films across different categories and all that. And this year we upgraded in a couple of parameters in terms of the whole experience of the festival. In the first edition, we had to run very fast. So we used YouTube and those platforms to showcase the film for 3 days of the festival. This year we increased the time of festival, the main festival activities from 3 days to 7 days and exhibition from 3 days to 30 days. So if one wants to see all 40-45 films which are there in the part of your official selection, you know, one can see very comfortably in the, sitting on the couch, in the bedroom or drawing room or whatever they would, wherever they would want to, or in the garden simply using their handset mobile, they could do it. So we tied up with a platform called Movie Saints. Movie Saints is a platform, it's a US based platform that delivers films via online medium on internet. And you can register, log in yourself and move to watching the film just like you would watch them in the theater. I mean, it's just like watching it on the computer and you can choose the films. There are synopsis of films, there are trailers of films available. So you actually can have a bit of experience and then you can watch that whole film. And of course there, there is a bit of revenue generation from there also. So Whether it's a project of passion, but it still requires certain amount of investment, and both in terms of time and also money, because there are things which you have to do. Exhibition itself is an expense. How do you show the films? How do you get the people to watch the films? So people from across the world could actually watch those films. And therefore it, it truly became an international kind of event. What we also did is usually In festivals, on one hand, you support the filmmaker, you give them a platform to express their creativity, et cetera, et cetera. There are other things also there for kids because it is eventually a kids event. So in the kids event, we do a lot of workshops for them for filmmaking. We do workshops on scriptwriting, we do workshops on cinematography, et cetera. So one of the interesting workshops we had conducted by one gentleman called Ritesh Taksande. And he had created a specific course on mobile filmmaking, how you can use your mobile phone to make films. And youngsters would just love it because, you know, nowadays the time of mobile, everybody has mobile. There are some nice apps which are there. And interestingly, these apps allow you to do pretty much good work, which is like your professional editing, you know? So there are apps which allow you to edit films, apps which allow you to put overlay and edit that and give special effects and without any kind of watermark, without any kind of distraction. And you can really put together a nice story. Besides that, this year there was one more very interesting concept we had. Now, typically, most often what happens is that adults make films or the film content for children, and adults only judge them also. Now, this time we created a specific child jury of 5 kids, and we also asked them to review 2 of the film categories of short films. So of course we had 5 categories. So in live action, we had long and short. Short films are less than 30 minutes and long films were 30 to 90 minutes. So we had live action, long, short, animation, long, short. We also had kids films, kids made films. So we got this children jury to judge the short films in animation category and live action. Then they all discussed, they evaluated. We had a proper jury meet for them, which we recorded it. And then we arrived at a very scientifically plus their thoughts and views subjectively, and we arrived and narrowed down to the prizes. So, so child jury awards were additional awards than the normal jury awards for those categories. So the normal jury also judged all categories. But for 2 categories, we had child jury. In child jury, again, we had a very good mix. So there was one celebrity child artist, there was one classical dancer. There was one young author, poet, and one theater person. So we had creatively inclined children to come together, form a jury, and watch the content made by adults for children to consume, and then judge them and give an award. So it was quite an interesting exercise in terms of involving the children and bringing them together. So that was a bit of a wholesome package that, you know, we could create for children.

Praveen, that's an amazing explanation of what sounds like a Herculean effort to curate so much content from around the world. Can you tell us about how you got people to come and watch? Because you've explained the partnerships with UNESCO and the Filmmakers Society, but what about the audience? How did you get that breadth of audience to make it worthwhile for all those filmmakers to take part?

Right. So primarily the promotions were done through social media. We had a lot of active social media pages on Instagram, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. And we also involved the filmmakers to, you know, create the buzz within their markets and get people to watch the films and all those things. And mainly social media, because in case of online environment, that is the best way to reach out people. Of course, if you have a physical, then you can do a whole lot of other things. You can put billboards and promotions. So that was the key way to reach out to audience. And Movie Saints provided a good platform for us to exhibit anywhere in the world. And that's how we would manage.

And can you give us an idea of the audience figures? You've talked about sort of 1,500 movies and over sort of 7 days, any, any statistics you can share about how many people logged in?

Numbers, it's difficult for me to share the numbers. We don't discuss usually out. But it runs in hundreds of thousands. So these are good numbers.

Yes. Good. Well, it just gives some context, doesn't it? I appreciate the confidentiality, but it justifies both your investment and that of all the filmmakers to take part.

Yes.

So you did mention, Praveen, about the financial aspect from an entrepreneurial perspective. What was the business model then? Because if you've got a lot of people doing things for free, Can you share how does it generate enough money at least to fund itself and to be sustainable for the future?

Absolutely. So interestingly, usually these are all large-scale events and they require huge investment. However, having said this, COVID and online environment gave us an opportunity to create something like this at a very minimal cost in terms of expense at our side. And in our first edition, we did get a bank to come in join hands to partner with us. They had a product for kids' bank account. I don't want to get into the numbers because again, that's a more personal discussion with them. This is the kind of opportunities that you have. And as you go ahead, we can scale up. There are many ways to scale it up. So one of the ways to scale up is to involve a lot of schools, create certain programs for them. And in those programs, you can teach them filmmaking on various aspects of filmmaking. You can show certain films. You can have the director of the film coming in, talking about his experience, et cetera. So those kinds of things will mean revenue. Though this is not something in the immediate term I see revenues, good revenues coming in. It will take its own time. It's a very long-term mission for me. As I said, I must've talked to you earlier. It's a mission for me. It's a lifetime mission for me. And we need to keep building this activity. As we go ahead, I think moment we are able to bring it on ground. And then you will see on-ground and online both coming together, pretty good audience at that point in time.

I love that, Praveen. And yeah, you shared about having your grandchildren in years to come saying, you know, Grandpa Praveen organized this, which is a lovely vision there. In terms of 2022, we've still got COVID, still offline. Tell us just briefly what's the plan for this year?

See, we started with COVID First year our theme was togetherness in distancing times. And this time we were going through COVID, so our theme was stories of positivity and tried to recognize the filmmakers who are, you know, talking the stories of positivity. Now, when we come out of this pandemic, we'll create some theme which is around this, you know, how you came out of it and, you know, what is your life ahead, et cetera. And of course, we will try to reach out a lot more partners like banks. There are other corporate partners which could probably want to be a part of this journey because everybody, there are brands that want to catch them young. So those are brands which can possibly be good partners and engage them for the more intensive activity. And we will keep it always global. We, as I said, we have, we have a truly global participation, both in terms of filmmakers, in terms of jury, judges, and his entire team which is involved from all over the world. We'll keep carrying ahead the same team into the next editions. And hopefully, if in a couple of years, if we are able to get a firm footing within local market, we might make this festival as a traveling festival. We might do this festival in some other country every year. And those kinds of things are always, you know, considerable. Of course, then that's when you require some support from cross-country governments and all those things. But when the time is right, that will also happen. I'm in no hurry. I believe in taking baby steps and then bigger steps and then leaps. So that's fine.

Well, Praveen, maybe your 10-year-old son in 10 years will then have the grandchildren to carry this forward. Praveen Nagda, Festival Director of Kids Cinema. How can people get ahold of you?

Oh, you can reach me on my emails. I'm on social media. I'm pretty active on my social media. My LinkedIn is available, my website. I'm just a phone call away. It's all public information. All right.

And I will include Praveen's details in the show notes as always. Praveen Nagda, Festival Director of Kids Cinema 2021 and 2022 and '23 and '24 and '25 and into the future. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show.

Thank you, Jim. Thank you. It was a pleasure to talk to you. I hope your listeners will be happy to listen this.

I'm sure they'll be as inspired as I have been. Praveen Nagda joining me from Mumbai. Thank you so much. How would we say goodbye in India?

We say goodbye. In Hindi, we say फिर मिलेंगे। फिर मिलेंगे।