The Indywood Film Carnival

Hema Iyer Ramani

Hyderabad is the perfect setting for any film festival because the Ramoji Film city has been designed to provide the ambience for not only film shoots, but also to host mega-scale events. The film city is a complete city by itself and boasts of being able to handle 50 film units simultaneously, catering to their pre and post production requirements while also offering them locales in the form of airport, railway station, Japanese gardens, prisons, village settings, shops on streets, sign boards on shops painted for effect to make it seem old and so on. Buses piled around different streets that had been made famous on the screens of many a film. Though the organizers and Ramoji themselves had not organized a conducted tour around the famous film city, I was lucky to be shown around by Deepak Baldev of Glitters Film Academy (a participant) who insisted that I shouldn’t leave without seeing it !