Abhinay Deo on his internet present Brown going to Berlinale: Movie festivals are feather within the cap, not cap itself

Abhinay Deo’s newest directorial, the online present Brown starring Karisma Kapoor, is all set to go to the Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition, out there choose part.

And the filmmaker says whereas such honours do add gravitas to a maker’s filmography, it’s not the entire and sole. “Berlinale, because of the kind of importance it holds in the festival circuit, definitely adds weight. Second, the honesty with which they run the festival, they choose the films from across the world and that certainly adds value to your filmography. Having said that, that does not define the filmmaker. What defines a filmmaker is what they create at the end of the day. It gets awarded, appreciated internationally or nationally, it’s a great thing. It adds a feather to the cap, but it’s not the cap itself,” he says matter-of-fact.

Deo has previously directed movies resembling Delhi Stomach and Blackmail. Brown is his first internet collection. However if you point out this, he brings up one other mission he did with actor Anil Kapoor. “I did something like a web series, 24, which was probably at that point on TV because no OTT existed then in our country. But fact of the matter is 24 was the first web series conceptually, with limited number of episodes, done at an extremely high budget, and well thought through. In that sense, Brown is my second. But purely from OTT point of view, after OTT has descended upon us as a platform, this is my first,” he says.

Whereas field workplace simply decides whether or not a movie has clicked with the audiences or not, and TV has TRPs,, how will Deo gauge whether or not his debut is a success on OTT or not? “For me, my benchmark always, whether it is TV, cinema or the web, will be what do people feel about it. Of course, I think that should be the benchmark for any director. At the end of the day, particularly I feel for OTT where viewership is not exactly quantified very easily, it becomes a difficult proposition to gauge. You can say a film is a hit or flop, but can’t say that for a web series,” he opines.