Idiots' Confessions

A whole year has passed, 382 days to be exact. We could raise only 1,69,587 rupees of which 12,482 rupees had been spent on commissions of our online fundraising partners. So, we were left with 1,57,105 rupees to spend for the film. Our pledge was not much. All we needed was 2,50,000 rupees for the film to materialize. After 382 days of work, we have 1324 people on our FB page but only around 160 of them are contributors. Even among these 160, there are people who could easily chip in 500 rupees at least but being led by misunderstanding all they contributed was just 1 rupee. Of course not to forget people who forgot the promises they made (you know, next month when I get the paycheck, I will... types). Some of our friends sent us 500 and said they would be happy to send in another 5000 if they get the assurance that the film is really going to happen. Well, 40% of the shooting part is over, but this trivial fact could not win over their doubtful minds. Some of our beloved friends often show up on social networks (and even in real life) asking, "hey, how's the project going"(?). Dear friend, if you are so concerned about this project what stopped you from contributing 1000, 100, 10 or even as minimum as 1 rupee? Do you really care? When you tell us you believe that we are doing something path-breaking and it will inspire a lot of others, we sincerely doubt your honesty.

In the month of May, 2012, we stopped posting frequently on this blog because we got the feeling that it's not working. The heap of words are not convincing enough. The realization was true, now we are assured as Google shows us that we have 6,993 page views since the creation of this blog and that does not change the fact that we have only around 160 people who have contributed to the film financially. Here's how we got them. The amount of individual contributions are not mentioned just for the sake of privacy. 

OFFLINE COLLECTION

[1,12,974.51 INR Raised]

1.      S N Nanda

2.      Rajiv Sinha

3.      Carole

4.      Kanungo

5.      Swagat Sen

6.      D.K Sornam

7.      Dev Daruka

8.      Surya Shankar Dash

9.      Maharatna Banerjee

10.  Dhrubaa Ghosh

11.  Bagula Bhagat

12.  Hemant Kumar Gaba

13.  Samarendra Das

14.  Gurpal Singh

15.  Whose handwritings are not readable (3)

16.  People who forgot to drop a mail (12-15)

17.  Riddhiman Basu

18.  Ritam Bhaumik

19.  Two Unknown Foreigners

20.  Avishek Thakur

21.  Ginnetta Correlli

22.  Jason Marsh

23.  Kanchan Sengupta

24.  Sayan Chakraborty

25.  Shamayita Banerjee

26.  Apratim Ganguly

27.  Ajasra Das

28.  Manju Chakraborty

29.  Kamal Kumar Roy

30.  Monomita Roy

31.  Shubhankar Mazumdar

32.  Debdut Sadhu

33.  Supratim Sanyal

34.  Tushar Sarkar

35.  Anirban Roychowdhury

36.  Gairik Roy

37.  Sunando Patra

38.  Nishan Chatterjee

39.  Kumar Chitrang

40.  Tuhin Mallik

41.  Soumyaditya Nanda

42.  Moumita Chakraborty Goswami

43.  Sushanta Kar

44.  Sonali Sengupta

45.  Suddha Prasad Bagchi

46.  Gangotryi Sorcar

47.  Achintyarup Ray

48.  Ceaser Mandal

49.  Soumya Maiti

50.  Atish Baul

51.  Justin Andrews

52.  Joydeep Thakur

53.  Avijit Ghoshal

54.  Debajyoti Guha

55.  Mrinal Mazumdar

56.  Anirban Dashgupta

57.  Debajyoti Mukherjee

58.  Sanjoy Sinharoy

59.  Saptarshi Dey

60.  Mr. Dasgupta

61.  Maifuz Ali

62.  Koustav Bhattacharya

63.  Mrinmoy Chatterjee

64.  Ugen Bhutia

65.  Shre Kumar Chatterjee

66.  Gautam Kar

67.  Sumit Bhattacharya

68.  Nilabhra Banerjee

69.  Amik Das

70.  Argha Sen

71.  Ipsita Palbhowmick

72.  Maj Gaurav Garg

73.  Two old LFEBF members

74.  Arpan Chowdhury

75.  Nabendu Bhattacharya

76.  Ranjan Roy

77.  Subrata Mukherjee

78.  Ramakrishna Bhattacharya

79.  Anirban Bandopadhyay

80.  Debanjan Das

81.  Anirban Chattopadhyay

82.  Parambrata Chatterjee

83.  Abhinandan Ghose

84.  Anisha Das

85.  Anonymous

86.  Indrani Datta

87.  Subir Kumar Sengupta

88.  Soma Sengupta

89.  Abhijay Sengupta

90.  Samran Huda

91.  Deva Agarwal

92.  Dinu Bandopadhyay

Via Wishberry.in

[54, 017 INR Raised | 43, 601.77 INR Received]

1.   Sreemanti Sengupta

2.   Ms Dasgupta

3.   Siddhartha Nath

4.   Anindya Bose

5.   Mukherjee Twish

6.   Amiya Kumar

7.   Bipad Bhanjan Behera

8.   Antara Kundu

9.   Avishek Nag

10. Indranil Ghosh

11. Somak Dutta

12. Saswata Chakraborty

13. Rupa Debnath

14. Soumya Bhattacharya

15. Snigdha Sheel

16. Sabyasachi Das

17. Adheesh Verma

18. Neeti Tandon

19. Aroonav Das

20. Ankush Hore

21. Neha Bhat

22. Koushik Bagchi

23. Tarang Desai

24. Rijabrata Chakraborty

25. Samyamoy Sen Gupta

26. Somnath Roy

27. Sounak Kar

28. Rammohan

29. Manas Tarai

30. Aniket Mukherjee

31. Shounak Ghoshal

32. Supriyo Das

33. Soham Pal

34. Ankan Paul

35. Bikramjit Chakraborty

36. Atma Prakash Mishra

37. Amir Motlagh

38. Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

39. Varsha Chakraborty

40. Tuhin Subhra Sinha

41. Ugenther Kumar

42. K V Krishna Rao

43. Arnab Ganguly

44. Rohosen Bandopadhyay

45. Riccardo Bella

46. K V Srinivasan

47. Kannaiah C H

48. Sanhita Modak

49. Ushnish

Via IndieGoGo

[2, 595.84 INR Raised | 529.02 INR Received]

1. Salil Biswas
2. Tushnik Chowdhury
3. Soumen Atta

TOTAL

1,69,587.35 INR Raised | 1,57,105.30 INR Received

Commissions and Set-up fees: INR 12, 482.05

So, "hey, how's the project going", "how and when are you planning to release this film", "when is it going to happen" --- to all these questions we have only one answer. It's not going to happen automatically. We never said that we would make it happen. What we said was "Share, Donate, Make it Happen". So, it depends on you actually --- how shall it happen, how shall it reach the people or whether it shall happen at all. 

If you really care, if you really feel for it, make us include your name in the list posted above. We still need another 80,000 rupees. It's a 90 minute long film divided into 20 sequences with 16 characters and around 15 extras, shot in 4 different places. Just consider the cost of food and transport and tell us, are we asking too much (2.5 lacs)?

We had to stop the campaign in October, 2012 because the team is small. We can't keep on asking or trying to convince one person the Nth time for contributing 100 rupees. No, we cannot go and meet you for collecting 500 rupees. We have a whole film to make. You don't have the time to volunteer, we know that, you have your own life and you cannot really spend much time on spreading the word in favour of us. But you have our bank a/c details, you have our Paypal details. You can at least do your bit and add some value to your support, a value that counts.

Regards

The Shortest Blogpost on Earth

We have raised more than 100 grands till date from more than 100 contributors. We still need to raise another 150 grands in less than one month for our film.
Now, do we sleep all day?
Yes, we do
and Thank you

P.S: Every 2nd person you see is a shameless liar. Stay alert!

Promo

Trends

Depression is like cloud, you know what I mean if you are a sensitive man.
I came across another talented friend of mine today who seemed to be in a mood of a quarrel. These kinds of friends, see, I used to have a lot of them before. They will never do what they should have been doing. They would opt for a job at some office and curse the society for being so cruel. They'd curse their social and economic whereabouts for everything i.e the obstructions of becoming a popular artiste. But it's actually them who decided to sign the papers because they felt insecure at a point of time.
If you know what you are doing and who you are inside, is there a reason to get distracted like that, my friend? Lack of confidence and recognition can make feel a mediocre artiste that he is somebody like Rimbaud or Artaud, only if people could get it! Gosh!
What's there in recognition? If you are all for work why should you care at all? No matter what, just keep on working, use your brain and muscles and don't become jealous of anyone around.
Analyze, won't you?

Whatever, let's come to the point, if you are subscribed to the Facebook page you must have already come to know that the figure now stands at INR 12,908.15 /-  but what you don't know yet is that the highest individual contribution is Rs. 2500. Let's see who's going to break it and donate 5k for the first time.

Our first identified donor from another country is Ginnetta Correlli, a filmmaker friend. Her generosity was soon found in another filmmaker friend named Jason Marsh. We are thankful to them, we think their contributions would motivate others in other parts of the world too.

Be it Re.1 or Rs.1006 people are contributing for real. It's not one month yet since we started at BYOFF on the 25th of February and we're almost at 13k already. May we call it overwhelming, the response? Now we have a reason to be confident and announce, Yes, We'll Start Shooting this April. Now, whichever comes first, 20k or the first shoot, We'll start posting the story-line in the form of a novella, post by post, serially. Friends, asking again, do you have a blog where you can share the novella with some basic information on this project to help raise funds more effectively? --- We think we'll have MAM (Mad About Moviez) beside us. Are you too MAD, about MOVIEZ? Join hands, let's make it happen for the sake of the pure madness

Depression

Cooking is a good way to handle depression. And when it comes to experiments Einstein comes second to me. I did not post anything last night. This post is actually delayed by almost 9 hours. It's just I was not feeling like writing anything. I wanted the page to reach 200 by 01:00 hours today. But every time everything can not be in favour of you. This simple truth made me depressed. As the Sun said hi, I posted an angry status on Facebook. I was angry with the useless 722 in my friendlist out of which I consider only 50 to be effective enough and 22 to be real friends. I went to the kitchen, started my day with experiments, came back, criticized Bengali poetry of the last decade and then all of a sudden I realized that I haven't invited all my friends to the page yet! :-D

These kinds of things keep on happening to me often. Like I have already promised four Bengali magazines and one publisher friend of mine to submit some works as soon as possible. Now I don't know whom to betray. Any way, almost without any effort we got 20 more likes today. It's not that depressing really. Moreover, we got another mention in the BYOFF coverage of Hindustan Times (Kolkata Edition). As soon as the HT server is ok I'll post it on the 'Media and Articles' page

We need a lot of support. I hope you to be there, standing by this project. Please help us reach 200 in another 15 hours. The day has started in a positive way, with 5 likes in the early hours. We are on 183 now. Another 17 is not a big deal really, isn't it?

4th Day Begins

At the end of 72 hours after the campaign was launched on Facebook, we were at 158. Not bad really. But I've seen more during my last film. When we stopped promoting the FB page of Memories... of a Dead Township, we were at 239. We didn't need more. But this time we do need. We need to cross even the 443 at LFEBF Official FB Page in order to make this project a success. Show your support, spread the word as far as possible friends. Can you make us reach 200 by the end of 96 hours? Today my article was published on MAM (Mad About Moviez, a Mumbai based forum of film enthusiasts). You can read it here or you can find it on the "Media & Articles" page of  this blog.

The 2nd thing is Paypal, god knows what they are doing with my PAN number. The verification process is not over yet even after such a long time. Once they are satisfied, there should be no problem anymore for you to donate via Paypal. Till then bear with us, and also with Paypal.

More updates are likely to be posted soon. Keep in touch

BYOFF, 2012 - The fest where I started it

Moi, Un Mendiant (With Sriparna Dey)...                       

                                                 

I launched the campaign on the closing day of this years' BYOFF. Thanks to Mr. Gurpal Singh who kept on encouraging me to go for it throughout the festival. If he was not that pushy I don't know whether I'd have started the campaign there (as I thought earlier) or not. Actually I was quite depressed due to a lot of things. During the presentation of my film, in his introductory speech, Mr. Singh all of a sudden started speaking about the campaign. Surprisingly, an old man of around 60 years (pure guess!) took out a 100 rupee note from his wallet and said, "Here is your one rupee. Come take it." That is precisely how it all started on the 23rd of February, 2012.

On 24th, I was feeling enthusiastic enough to run and get some print outs etc for the campaign but again, I lost all the energy by the evening. Mr. Singh probably could guess it. He came again to inspire me while I was just drinking beer out of nothing, sitting inside a cottage or something like that. He asked me whether I've started collecting the money or not. I thought damn man, what am I doing! Am I going to do it or not!

The feeling kept on being felt till I rushed to the open stage to make an official announcement on the evening of the 25th. Not that everyone accepted it with open mind but all's well that ends well. I gathered Rs. 2,444 by the end of the festival. This initiative also got mentions on the BYOFF coverages of Midday, Long Live Cinema and Dear Cinema.

The fundraising did begin finally!
Hoof!