The Indian participants are singing the praises of MIPCOM. Sellers, buyers, co-production hunters – all of them have had their day under the Cannes sun.
Optimystix’s CEO Rajeev Vyas, CGI Mantra’s Vinit Karnik, Escotoonz’s A D Meta, Green Gold’s Rajiv Chilakalapudi, Discovery India’s Pankaj Saxena, Sony Entertainment’s Neeraj Arora and Sunil Lulla, Star India’s Rajesh Kamath and Shailaja Kejriwal, Animation Bridge’s Biren Ghose, the Famous Studios’ gang, Toonz Animation’s Jayakumar, UTV’s Jyoritmoy Saha and Vikas Verma, Modi Entertainment’s Lalit Modi and consultant R K Singh, DishTV’s Sunil Khanna and Gagan Goel.
Vyas has hired a UK-based partner in order to make a push internationally with an indigenous format and to acquire and distribute formats for the Indian market. He says that the interest for the format has been tremendous at this year’s MIPCOM. Saxena has been aggressively buying for the Indian Discovery channels.”It’s not true that we don’t have budgets,” he says. “Discovery is investing huge amounts of money on expansion globally. And India is getting a fair share of the pie.”
Lulla and Arora are mighty pleased with the deals that have been notched up. “The market has thrown up interesting opportunities for us. We are coming back for MipTV and in a bigger way,” says Arora.
Karnik points out that the market has been very exciting for him. “We are a new studio and are looking at generating original animation content and also offering our services to American and European animation companies. And we have had a good response to our proposals.”
Ghose says that both MIPCOM and MIPCOM Junior have delivered for him. “I have quite a few projects under my belt and I am working on them like an executive producer,” he says. “The companies here know what kind of quality I can offer and know that I will deliver. Hence, they have been very receptive.”
