International
Scripting a business for World Cinema
A small group of 40-somethings is discussing Akira Kurosawa‘s film Seven Samurai in a roadside tea shop in Mumbai. The ravages of nature, the tension between good and evil and the painting-like visuals are heated points of discussion.
It is this crowd that Shemaroo Entertainment is aiming to grow, as the home video major aims to grab a major slice of this premium segment in an otherwise cut-throat mass market driven by price wars.
“While our main business will continue to be mainstream Bollywood, World Cinema will give us a niche, upscale market with pricing power,” says Shemaroo Entertainment director Hiren Gada.
Shemaroo faces competition from Moser Baer which has assembled over 100 World Cinema titles, most of which are procured from Palador. The advantage Shemaroo has built over its home video rival is by striking an alliance with UTV. According to the pact, stitched in November, Shemaroo will have access to UTV‘s World Cinema titles for home video distribution.
But it is not competition that is worrying Gada at this stage. “We will together have to grow the market. It is at a very nascent stage for us to fight for market share,” he says.
Agrees Moser Baer COO G Dhananjayan, “World Cinema is a very small market at this stage. And to add salt to the injury, we have to fight against piracy. We have to expand the market.”
Which is why Shemaroo has kick-started a four-day long Kurosawa film festival in Kolkata. The idea is to spread awareness and visibility for such genre of movies. Says Gada, “In India, the theatrical release of world cinema films is more of a promotional activity.”
UTV, which aims to play in a bigger canvas, is also planning theatrical releases. The first to roll out on 29 July will be the Iraninan movie Waltz with Bashir. “We are getting producer Roman Paul here and the red carpet will be held at PVR. Our plan is to have one such big release every month,” says UTV Global Broadcasting executive director Shantanu Aditya.
For UTV, the other avenue to tap audiences is through film festivals. Recently in March, UTV held a Russian Film Festival that was followed by the French Film Festival in June.
“It is necessary to simultaneously create new audiences for world cinema, thereby increasing the overall consumption,” says Aditya.
Keeping this in mind, UTV organises regular film shows and has its own film club that has 6.5 lakh members. “We have tie-ups with Alliance Francaise, NCPA and other attaches of different countries along with whom we hold a lot of events including film festivals. The attempt is to educate people about the quality and know the impact of World Cinema,” avers Aditya.
For UTV, the bigger revenue pie is in broadcasting. UTV World Movies is trying to carve out a space for itself outside the two English movie channels – HBO and Star Movies. Avers Aditya, “Television is a mass medium compared to home video or theatre. We will first showcase the movie titles on our channel before we move it to the other revenue exploitation platforms like home video and theatrical release.”
Having a similar business model is NDTV Lumiere with broadcasting as the pillar around which would revolve home video and theatrical releases. The joint venture company, with NDTV Imagine holding 51 per cent and Manmohan Shetty and Sunil Doshi having the balance 49 per cent, has already invested $10 million in the venture.
“We plan to invest $7 million over the next 18 months for augmenting our reach and replenishing our catalogue,” says Doshi.
NDTV Lumiere is currently available on digital cable and is in talks with DTH operators to widen the channel‘s presence. High carriage fee is not making it feasible for the channel to be on analogue cable at this stage.
On the home video front, NDTV Lumiere has tied up with Excel Entertainment and has already released 15 DVDs.
Sourcing content is an ardous task as the market is scattered across the world. “It needs special skills as one has to select the right content from several sources at a competitive price. Making the right buys, however, is possible if one has an expert eye,” says Doshi.
Piling up content at low costs is what is attracting players and presenting a case for a viable business model down the road even as revenue opportunities are limited. Locking in long-term content means creating an entry barrier while building a nest for future exploitation as the market sizes up.
NDTV Lumiere has invested around $7 million to build a library of approximately 400 titles, 75 per cent of which are contemporary-led. “We are looking at procuring 250-300 more films over the next 18 months,” says Doshi.
UTV, which entered early in the market (except Palador), has invested close to $6 million for building a library of 700 titles.
Piracy is hurting the home video market for World Cinema. With prices of DVDs being higher, pirates have a costing advantage. While Moser Baer has priced its content at Rs 399, Shemaroo has kept its DVD price at Rs 349.
Says Gada, “In case of Hindi films, Moser Baer‘s mass pricing has acted as a deterrent against piracy. But that is not the case with World Cinema where the DVDs cost higher.”
The challenge is to sell more DVDS at a brisker pace. “We have sold 5,000 copies in the last two months. We have already released 10 home video titles. The target this year is to have 50 releases and sell 60,000 units,” says Aditya.
Agrees Doshi, “On the home video front, getting volumes is a long way off. As for the TV side of the business, the pay-TV environment needs to move towards digitalisation.”
So what would sustain the World Cinema movement as a business proposition? “It has to have a multi-pronged revenue approach. But broadcasting has to be the main side of the business,” says Aditya.
World Cinema players have a long road to cover before they can make their ventures profitable. But at least the script is being written now.
LOS ANGELES: Acting has never been an easy profession, but in recent years, it has acquired a new existential anxiety. Artificial intelligence can now mimic faces, clone voices and, in theory at least, speak any language it is fed. The fear that actors may soon be replaced by algorithms no longer belongs exclusively to science fiction. And yet, despite the rise of digital inauthenticity, some performers remain stubbornly resistant to replacement. The reason is not celebrity, nor even talent. It is language.
On paper, this should not be a problem. AI can translate. It can imitate accents. It can string together grammatically correct sentences in dozens of languages. But acting, inconveniently, is not about grammatical correctness. It is about meaning, and meaning is where AI still falters.
Machine translation offers a cautionary tale. Google Translate, now powered by neural AI, has improved markedly since its debut in 2006. It can manage menus, emails and airport signage with impressive efficiency. What it struggles with, however, are the moments that matter most: idioms, metaphors, irony, and cultural shorthand. Ask it to translate a joke, a threat disguised as politeness, or a line heavy with emotional subtext, and it begins to unravel. Acting lives precisely in those gaps.
This matters because film language is rarely literal. Scripts, particularly in independent cinema, rely on figurative speech and symbolism to convey what characters cannot say outright. Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is a useful example. The film’s recurring use of red operates on multiple levels: grief, desire, repression, liberation, and memory. These meanings are inseparable from the Spanish cultural context and emotional cadence. A translation may convey the words, but not the weight they carry. An AI-generated performance might replicate the sound, but not the sense.
This is where multilingual actors gain their edge. Performers such as Penélope Cruz and Sofía Vergara do not simply switch between languages; they move between cultural logics. Their fluency allows them to inhabit characters without flattening them for international consumption. Language, for them, is not an accessory but a structuring force.
Beyond European cinema, this becomes even more pronounced. Languages such as Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and underpin vast cinematic traditions. As global audiences grow more interconnected, the demand for authenticity increases rather than diminishes. Viewers can tell when a performance has been filtered through approximation. Subtle errors, misplaced emphasis, and an unnatural rhythm break the illusion.
There is also a practical dimension. Multilingualism expands opportunity. Sofía Vergara has spoken openly about how learning English enabled her to work beyond Colombia and access Hollywood roles. But this movement is not a one-way export of talent into English-speaking cinema. Multilingual actors carry stories, styles and sensibilities back with them, enriching multiple industries at once.
Cinema has always thrived on such hybridity. Denzel Washington’s performances, for instance, draw on the cultural realities of growing up African American in the United States, while also reflecting stylistic influences from classic Hollywood and Westerns. His work demonstrates how identity and influence intersect on screen. Multilingual actors extend this intersection further, embodying multiple cultural frameworks simultaneously.
At times, linguistic authenticity is not merely artistic but ethical. Films that confront historical trauma, such as Schindler’s List, rely on language to anchor their moral seriousness. When Jewish actors perform in German, the choice is not incidental. Language becomes a site of memory and confrontation. It is difficult to imagine an automated voice carrying that responsibility without hollowing it out.
This is why claims that AI heralds the death of language miss the point. Language is not just a delivery system for information. It is a repository of history, humour, power and pain. Fluency is not only about knowing what to say, but when to hesitate, when to understate, and when to let silence do the work. These are not technical problems waiting to be solved; they are human instincts shaped by lived experience.
AI may one day improve its grasp of metaphor and nuance. It may even learn to sound convincing. But acting is not about sounding convincing; it is about being convincing. Until algorithms can acquire memory, cultural inheritance and emotional intuition, multilingual actors will remain irreplaceable. AI may learn to speak. But it cannot yet learn to mean.
In an industry increasingly tempted by shortcuts, language remains stubbornly resistant to automation. And for actors who can move between worlds, linguistic, cultural, and emotional, that resistance is not a weakness, but a quiet, enduring advantage.
