Chintan Bhatt, who many of you will recognise as our resident interviewer, is now back to his hometown, Ahmedabad, after his resourceful stint in Mumbai. He has gone ahead, though, and done something that very few Gujarati creators have thought of. Green Chutney Films, a small content production company that he has co-founded with two of his friends, is already in business — with their first Gujarati-language skit-video recently released on their in-house Youtube channel.

To know more about this venture, we caught up with him, despite failing to rope him back as IIF’s favourite conversationalist. Here’s our chat with the original chatter:

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Tell us a little about your background and the team.

CB: So I am a Chartered Accountant by education, born and brought up in Ahmedabad. By the end of finishing chartered accountancy, I realised it was not something I enjoyed. Movies were always an escape for me since I was a kid and I decided to jump into it fully and shift base to Mumbai. I did a small course in film making and have been working in films, tv and ads for the last few years as an assistant. My two other co-founders are Rahul Tejwani and Manan Bhatt. Rahul has been a close friend since college and we both were always the outsiders everywhere, never quite fitting in anywhere. He is also a Chartered Accountant and has been working in the IT industry for quite a few years. Manan has also assisted in various projects in Mumbai, but he is principally an editor; he last edited the documentary ‘An Insignificant Man’.

The three of us have been wanting to work together for a long time, and we thought the time was just right to take the plunge and start something of our own. That is how Green Chutney Productions was born. We have started our Gujarati-content Youtube channel Untypicaland our initial videos and have received great response.

Another college friend Dharmesh, who has been working in London in the startup space, has joined us, and is helping us with strategizing social media and ways of monetizing our content. Slowly, we are building a team of collaborators, wherein clued-on people like Mananshree Jain who is handling our social media, as well as Raunuq Kamdar who is the actor in our initial videos, have been a great support.

You’ve spent some time working in the Bombay scene. What did you gather from all your experience?

One of the first and most important lessons for me from Bombay was that there are those who will talk about making something and those who will actually go and make anything. For many people, the idea of making a film or a short film or anything really is more important than actually getting into the hard grind and making it. I always have been an introvert. Therefore Bombay, I have learned, is hard to crack for someone like me who is neither very social nor great at making and holding onto contacts. Even a lot of independent filmmakers whom I admired from a distance, I learned from experience, have an almost cartel-like ring around them whereby no new people or talent are allowed, encouraged or any alternate views respected. The city can suck out your naïve optimism and take away the sheer love you have of what you are trying to make.

Of course there are lots of great things about Bombay and the work they do there, and it has taught me a lot over the years. It hasn’t not always been the trail-by-fire scenarios. And we are hoping to do great work there too soon. But we as a company have this motto to constantly find new talent and be open to newer voices, not only those who come from amongst us or think like us.

Luckily though at Green Chutney, I have a great team which finally lets me focus majorly on actual content, instead of all the other challenges that come with running a small production house. I like being the all-out creative guy for once, no frills attached.

Did the sudden spurt of recent commercial Gujarati cinema encourage you to go back and explore the local scene? Or was it always the goal and you were simply working towards it?

Gujarati cinema definitely was not on my radar for the longest time, and so the recent successes were a pleasant surprise. Certainly the work done by people like Abhishek Jain and others has been hugely inspiring, and that played a huge role in us coming back here and starting Green Chutney. I, like many others, am hoping that Gujarati cinema will eventually go the Marathi cinema way, and quality will constantly keep improving. There has been a spate of some very interesting films and film makers doing very interesting work here. And we are hoping to get into Gujarati-language feature films some way down the line. But right now the focus is on making digital content which tells regional stories but has viewers across boundaries.

So that is the primary purpose of your venture? Producing Gujarati web content sounds like a novel idea. Why do you think nobody had explored it fully yet?

We felt there is a huge demand for interesting local web content which nobody had yet tapped into. You know how it has been. There are a lot of clichéd ideas about Gujaratis and gujarati culture within our national pop-culture space, and this has always bothered me. Gujaratis I knew and grew up with did not talk, behave and think the way they have always been portrayed to. We thought this was a chance to tell very culturally rooted stories, but with our own treatment that hasn’t quite been tried here before. And we were very excited to see that people from outside Gujarat who did not understand the language actually understood and liked our first video. That is our aim going forward in our videos, and the web series which we are soon launching — that though the characters and the setting are extremely local, they are told with an honesty that hopefully transcends the regional barrier and people from all over should be able to identify with it.

Another aspect which we insist upon is the production quality of our content. Manan and I, having worked in certain styles and spaces before, make sure of a certain aesthetic and ‘look’ for everything that comes out of Untypical. We want to maintain this, because no one in the current local content space has done it before. We are excited to see the reactions going forward.

What’s the end goal?

Gujarati feature films are the goal and it may happen this year or the next. We are already working on a couple of ideas and developing them. But our goal as of now is to focus on content in shorter video formats, advertisements and web series, and develop a team whom we can support going forward. In the more immediate future, we are excited about launching a web series we have been working on.

How did you go about making your first video? Is it hard to find local talent?

Yes, that has been a huge challenge. We were lucky to have found actors like Raunuq, Mahnaz, Hemang who got the tone of what we were trying to make and have been a great support, but we do see it as a challenge going forward because we make different types of content and require a diverse pool of talent. And we are hoping that as people get to know more about us, we can get more actors and technicians to join us. Mustaqeem, who is our cinematographer in these initial videos, did great work too. But definitely there are issues with technicians in Ahmedabad, which, for example, we wouldn’t face in Mumbai.

Things like lighting, sound, post-production facilities, and finding people who are competent in these crafts is a big challenge here currently. Post production especially, and that too for online (‘the lesser medium,’ as commonly perceived) content, is virtually an alien concept here. We often had to rush to Bombay or send footage to Bombay for correction, as we couldn’t find anyone to do it here. We have trying to find good editors, who either have experience or at least a knack for such work, but even that has been a huge challenge.

But as someone recently said to me that on the flip side here, it isn’t as dry as it can be in Mumbai. Unlike Mumbai, what drives people here, we are now learning, is personal relationships and a belief in the content, not just financial rewards.

So how do young co-founders go about for funding their ventures?

Yes, that is what it boils down to, I guess. None of us are stand-up comedians or backed by anyone. We have all invested our time and energy and money into this with the conviction that it will work. Ultimately, that is the most important thing. There is almost a Keyser Soze level secrecy around the financial model utilized by agencies in Mumbai.

We come from a simple chartered accountancy background, so we have ideas of how to solve the financial issues on the way. But again, we are very clear that in order to hit volumes we won’t compromise on the quality of our content. So it will be constantly challenging to find ways of monetizing our content. But that’s what we’re in it for, in the end. Nothing will be easy, and it shouldn’t be. All our friends and families have been very supportive. It is not easy for gujarati parents to support their son to leave something as lucrative as Chartered Accountancy and follow a more uncertain path. But I have been lucky to have awesome parents who have never complained.

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Most aspiring Gujarati artists migrate to Bombay and Bollywood. When do you think the local scene will be attractive enough to get them concentrating on an alternate film culture like other states?

True. We have been trying to find actors and technicians (like myself) who have returned after migrating to Mumbai. But most of them are still very hesitant to do that. The idea of working in films in Mumbai, no matter how hard it is to crack, is still a big motivation for them. I totally get that. That is the dream. That is why I went there, too. I think that their trust and confidence to come back here to work will be stronger only once the quality in content across mediums becomes consistent along with financial incentives. It has to be a functioning model. We are confident about that happening eventually. It is an inevitability, but nobody can tell exactly when it’ll happen.

Any inspirational companies/entrepreneurs you’ve based your ambitions on? 

Honestly, we don’t have one. Of course, we are all big fans of the kind of work TVF, AIB and others are doing. But we are still figuring out our own independent voice and style and in which direction we want to go in. I am a big Mani Ratnam fan. It always amazed me how, when I would sit in his film, I would never notice the language, because the emotion and conflict in his stories are so rooted and yet told so powerfully and honestly, that language becomes very incidental. In a way, that is what we all want. We are a bunch of filmmakers and we are inherently obsessed with the quality of our content, and are constantly trying to find new ways to tell our stories. For now, that is the shorter format. The quantity of our work is not something we want to focus on as of now.

Green Chutney Films Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/greenchutneyfilms

Untypical Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0YxUu0S4DkC8YPW7zX9JIQ

Contact Chintan at b.chintan86@gmail.com for queries and applications.