Farhan Zamma: ‘In the present day, content material is pirated earlier than the credit roll’

Piracy has morphed into one thing way more harmful than bootleg DVDs. In his newest sequence First Copy that’s set within the Nineteen Nineties, director Farhan Zamma dives into this shadowy world as he tells the story of Arif, an unemployed teen who’s lured by the fast cash of movie piracy. “Rising up within the Nineteen Nineties, I noticed how DVD piracy turned an reasonably priced, accessible type of leisure that households consumed collectively. What struck me later was that whereas the trade has explored main scams of Harshad Mehta, Nirav Modi, and [Abdul Karim] Telgi, we’ve by no means informed the story of piracy. It impacted the expansion of Indian cinema, but it was by no means addressed on display,” says the director.

Zamma has informed tales throughout codecs, from internet sequence Taj: Divided By Blood and Fortunately Ever After (2020) to documentaries, together with Heritage Trails One District One Product (2021). These previous experiences helped him form the Amazon MX Participant sequence. The director shares that whereas his love for research-driven storytelling fuelled First Copy’s script, the protagonist got here to life solely when he noticed Munawar Faruqui. “The story lacked a central character. That modified after I watched Munawar’s Dongri Ka Rider. The second I noticed it, I knew we had discovered our Arif. There have been questions on whether or not he might act, however we had been assured in our alternative.”

His analysis of 13 months took him by the wildest true tales. “The tales revealed the dimensions of the problem. This wasn’t simply petty theft; it was an 
organised system,” asserts the director.

Piracy continues to plague Indian cinema even at this time. Final month, information emerged that as per an audit commissioned by Sikandar’s makers, the Salman Khan-starrer had suffered losses of about R91 crore on account of piracy. Point out this to Zamma, and he says, “We’re making a present about piracy in an age the place content material is pirated earlier than the credit roll. First Copy doesn’t glorify piracy. We’re holding up the mirror to a system that is still damaged; the instruments might have modified, however the issue hasn’t.”

Farhan Zamma

True tales 

As a part of his analysis on movie piracy, Farhan Zamma learnt about real-life experiences of many filmmakers. He recounts, “Sanjay Gupta recalled being pressured by the underworld to promote his movie’s worldwide rights at double the same old value in order that these prints might be pirated overseas and smuggled again into India simply earlier than the discharge. Madhur Bhandarkar shared how some producers, overwhelmed by mounting losses, ended up promoting their very own reels to pirates merely to recuperate [a part of] the fee.”