Anupam Sharma: Making an Impact | FilmInk

For over 20 years, Sydney based producer and filmmaker Anupam Sharma (The Run, UnINDIAN) has helped build ties between the Australian and Indian screen industries.

With his own production company Temple and through advocacy (he is the inaugural chair of the Australia India Film Council), Sharma has been a vocal supporter of closer collaboration between the two countries.

His latest documentary, Bollywood Downunder, currently in post, 22 years in the making, continues down that path.

Produced by Sharma, Claire Haywood (Pink House) and Deepti Sachdeva (The Run), Bollywood Downunder provides a look at India’s iconic films’ love affair with Australia, and features interviews with stars Anupam Kher, Farhan Akhtar, Fardeen Khan and Harman Baweja, alongside former Premier of Victoria Ted Baillieu and former Premier of South Australia Mike Rann, among other Australian film personalities.

Sharma also has the doco Framed in production, which looks at Kamer Nizamdeen, a student wrongly arrested for terrorism, kept in solitary confinement for 30 days, only to be released without any charges but also without an apology.

At AIDC, FilmInk caught up with Sharma to talk the two projects.

Can you tell us about Framed, and what piqued your interest?

“When I was driving back on the first lockdown, I heard the story on ABC. And for me, it had all the right herbs and spices in it. It was a story about an innocent person. It was a story about my Australia in 2022. It was story with global proportions. Together with my company Temple, that’s our specialty, we tell diverse Australian stories for a global audience. Because that’s where I believe Australian stories resonate really well. So, it had all the inclinations. And when I got in touch, the moment he agreed for us to do a film on him, Screen Australia, Screen NSW and SBS came on board for development, which was encouraging.

“We were lucky to have all the development investment. Then we got eligible for some other grants because Covid was on. And any money we got as a business, we just put it back into development. We developed it in Sydney, we shot in India, we shot in Sri Lanka.

“Liz Burke is development producer. We have got executive producer Matthew Carter from Above the Line Accounting. And we’ve just got on board another diverse executive producer from Sydney, Pradnya Dugal.

“We only have two or three weeks of shoot to go. I’m looking at going into post production by July or August and getting a rough cut before the end of the year. But we basically want to get this story out to the world as soon as possible.”

You’ve worked closely with Kamer, the subject of the film. How involved has he been?

“He’s a delightful young man. What impressed me and my development producer, Liz Burke, is the fact that he has got so much class. You and I, if we have a little bit of injustice done to us on a road or on public transport, we are fuming. You want to give it back. He has got not an iota of bitterness inside. This is not a toxic film about fighting for injustice. This is just a mirror which shows that how positively we can bring change and how positively we can deal with injustices. Kamer is a sweetheart, and I’m very happy to reveal that his family have got so much confidence in this Australian feature that they have shared their home videos and all kinds of personal memorabilia.

“He’s absolutely on board. He’s very frank and I respect him and he respects me. For example, he was coming for an interview to Melbourne, and he said, ‘can we keep it quiet? I don’t want a lot of camera crews at the airport because I’m coming for the first time after I was chucked out’. And I said, ‘absolutely. Do you mind if I have someone with just a mobile phone, shooting with high tech specs?’ He said, ‘absolutely fine’. So, there is a lot of healthy communication. I think the most important thing, between a subject and a filmmaker in a documentary, is that both of us were in sync right from the beginning. If you are in sync with your subject, then the sky’s the limit.”

Are you hoping to go the theatrical route or broadcast with distribution?

“I think it’s an impact documentary. I think it belongs in a theatrical space. I think it belongs in a festival space. At the moment, we are working towards a storyline. We have got brilliant story consultant Saman Shad. And we are working on a story which is for 85 minutes, depending on how the streamers or the television stations react. We could do a cutdown version or we could do a limited series. But something which is very important, is that I strongly believe in telling diverse stories. I want to take it a step further – diverse stories should come from diverse people. We’ve got another Muslim writer, to have his perspective, because I don’t think anyone who is not Muslim can have that perspective. All those things are combining to make sure that we have potential audiences in Middle East. We had a lovely comment (in the FACTory Pitch at AIDC) from one of the CAA people who were there, and she was fascinated. She said, ‘North America is fascinated by what happens to innocent Muslims after 9/11. And we would love to see a North American potential audience’. So, all these things are essentially doing something which we all complain about in Australia, lack of audience. I believe if our stories can find more and more audiences, whether it’s Indian, Middle Eastern, North American, European, the more the better. So that’s the route we are taking at the moment. If hypothetically, fingers crossed, we do get some streamer interest, then I would be pushing for a festival run before.”

You’ve also got another project which you’re close to premiering, Bollywood Downunder, which has been in development for over 20 years. Can you tell us about where that’s at?

“That’s complete. It’s coming out in the next two months. We are submitting a work in progress to all the festivals. That is a mammoth project. That project has been in the making for 21 years. I started producing it with Lisa Duff, who is now our executive producer. And, we finished it with the producer, Claire Haywood, who is well known for feature documentary Pink House. My company has sustained itself for 24 years in Australia by servicing Bollywood, Chinese, and European productions as a service company. But as a filmmaker, every time these Bollywood films would come, we would shoot behind the scenes. We have got all that footage. During Covid, we got a provisional certificate from Screen Australia. We got private investment out of America, Europe, and India. And then we hit the jackpot with Karin Steininger, the editor best known for Oscar and Emmy winning documentary Remembering Anne Frank, coming on board as an editor and co-writer with a 35 week edit period. Now we are picture locked. We are just tying up the loose ends. It is a beautiful story. It looks at 89 years of Australia/India links, 20 years of Bollywood’s love affair with Australia. Through that, we tell a non-Indian audience when cinema came to India, literally a couple of months after Lumiere Brothers exhibited it in France, it became another religion in India, who termed it Bollywood, and how 89 years ago, a blue eyed blonde from Perth, Mary Evans, became the world’s first superhero woman playing lead roles in Bollywood films, and from then on to Bollywood films shooting here.

“And then, we end with where the future lies in Australia with films like Lion or Hotel Mumbai, which is telling shared stories with the Indian subcontinent. It’s a beautiful, beautiful journey. It’s a 93-minute feature documentary. We cannot wait to take it to the world because it is a quintessentially Australian story. But deals with the world’s biggest film industry. And I think that’s gold.”

Australia and India are increasingly looking for co-production opportunities, recently announcing a landmark bilateral Co‑production treaty. Do you see more opportunities for partnerships between the two countries?

“Absolutely. The future lies in shared stories, and shared stories are what Lion did. What Hotel Mumbai did, telling Australian stories about the biggest diaspora, one of the biggest diasporas in Australia, which is the South Asian diaspora.”

Can you tell us what else is on Temple’s Slate?

“We have a scripted feature called Honour, which got shortlisted as one of the hottest films out of Australia at the Goa Film Bazaar, where we attended in November last year with Cathy Rodda, who is a producer on that”.