MUMBAI: The Film Writers Association will be conducting the Indian Screenwriters’ conference in Mumbai on 13 and 14 December in Mumbai.
This year’s conference is dedicated to Vijay Tendulkar and his work.
At the last conference at FTII in August 2006, many issues were raised and addressed like what are a writer’s legitimate rights, what should be the standard of remuneration, what about credit protection, how does one deal with royalties and what are the problems confronting the writer-director and the writer-producer relationship?
This year’s programme is divided into 10 sessions. The opening session will have a welcome address by Filmwriters Association president Jalees Sherwani followed by the keynote speech by Indian Screenwriters Conference convener Anjum Rajabali. Filmwriters Association executive committee member Santosh Saroj will present the 2006-08 Report.
The first session will be dedicated to Vijay Tendulkar and his work. It will be chaired by Govind Nihalani and will have Dr. Jabbar Patel, Amol Palekar, Imteyaz Hussain as speakers. K. Hariharan will be the observer.
The second session is titled – What makes the Indian script unique? This will be chaired by Kamal Haasan and have Nasreen Munni Kabir, Ashutosh Gowariker, Vinay Shukla as speakers. BR Ishara will be the observer.
The session called Writing for Television in the post-Doordarshan era will be chaired by Lekh Tandon and will have speakers like Aatish Kapadia, Vinod Rangnath and Rajesh Dubey as speakers. Arshad Sayyed will be the observer.
Are Indian screenwriting standards a cause for concern? session will be chaired by Rajkumar Hirani and have speakers like Abbas Tyrewala, Abhijat Joshi and S.M. Vasanth. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra will be the observer.
The politics of the script session will be chaired by Prakash Jha and have Atul Tiwari, Anjum Rajabali, Jahnu Barua, Anurag Kashyap as speakers. Kamlesh Pandey will be the observer.
Writers’ Rights will be addressed in the next session, which will be chaired by Rajabali. This session will have two speakers from the legal space namely – Ashni Parekh and Rohini Vakil. Panelists include Robin Bhatt and Saket Chaudhury with Dinesh Chaturvedi and Imteyaz Hussain as observers.
The Writer-Director Relationship will be touched upon in a session moderated by Sriram Raghavan and will have three writers namely Shridhar Raghavan, Shibani Bathija and Pubali Chaudhuri and three directors – Subhash Ghai, Anurag Basu and Onir on the panel.
The Writer-Producer Relationship will be addressed in a session, which will be moderated by Abbas Tyrewala and will see writers Amole Gupte, Kamlesh Pandey and Navdeep Singh along with producers: Rohan Sippy, Vipul Shah and Ram Mirchandani.
The Indian Screenwriters’ conference will discuss the way forward and will be chaired by Javed Akhtar and will have the executive committee of FWA namely – Jalees Sherwani (president), Imteyaz Hussain (vice president), Sooni Taraporewala (vice president), B.R. Ishara (honorary secretary), Atul Tiwari (joint secretary), Sudhakar Sharma (joint secretary), and Subhash Jetly (treasurer).
