Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Jio Studio, Hotstar, Dharma Productions amongst the 40 buyers heading to the 4th edition of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival with Star’s Word to Screen Market
The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival with Star is hosting the fourth edition of its flagship property – the ‘Word to Screen Market.’ The event will be hosted on 23rd September 2019 in Mumbai along with stalwarts from the publishing world as well as the content creation industry.
Word to Screen Market is a first of its kind platform in India, where publishers and the literary community engage directly with content creators to option stories for films, TV and digital. In its fourth year, the market takes a big format leap that will enable the authors and content creators to have more face time with each. The books lists up for optioning this year dive into not only the frontlists of publishing houses but also their backlists, that are rich with undiscovered gems. Through the Word to Screen Market, MAMI sets out to push the boundaries of Indian content, each year, by celebrating literature as a potent muse.
Smriti Kiran, Artistic Director, MAMI – “The market needed a reboot. The thing with pioneering initiatives is that you have to be nimble and consistently ahead of the curve. When we launched the market we were certain that these two industries need to come together. The goal post for us has shifted now. The fifth edition of the market will not be restricted to a day but will be year-round. We are planning workshops and knowledge sessions making our engagement deeper to propel the staggering response we have got from both worlds.”
Launched in 2016, the Word to Screen Market has seen multiple success stories. Apart from forging successful relationships, the books that have been optioned out of the market are Indira by Sagarika Ghose, The Spectacular Miss by Sonia Bahl, How I Became a Farmer’s Wife by Yashodhara Lal, Cold Truth by Nikhil Pradhan, Killing Ashish Karve by Salil Desai, The Murder of Sonia Raikkonen by Salil Desai, 3 and a Half Murders by Salil Desai, and The Masala Murder by Madhumita Bhattacharya.
A total of 21 publishers will be participating in this edition of the Word to Screen Market including some of the biggest in the country like HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Juggernaut Books, DC Books, Westland Publications, and Rajkamal Prakashan. There will also be 40 Buyers and 24 authors including New York-based award-winning author Manreet Sodhi Someshwar (of ‘The Taj Conspiracy‘ fame), Amazon #1 Bestseller Sundari Venkatraman, Jagran-Nielsen Bestselling authors Satya Vyas, Nikhil Sacchan, Nilotpal Mrinal, Divya Prakash Dubey and Shashank Bharatiya. Also, in attendance will be bilingual bestsellers Pankaj Dubey and Anukriti Upadhyay, Salil Desai (of the Inspector Saralkar Series), Sanchit Gupta, Batul Mukhtiar, and several other new voices from the literary world.
Stories will be presented to over 40 content creation companies among which are some of the world’s significant production houses like Jio Studio, Netflix, Aamir Khan Productions (AKP), Disney India, Amazon Prime Video, Roy Kapur Films, Pritish Nandy Communications, Dharma Productions, Equinox Films, Junglee Pictures, Yash Raj Films (YRF) and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Key highlights of the Word to Screen Market 2019 are as follows:
- A Market List that has the exciting titles published across various languages which will be sent to buyers beforehand.
- The list has both the frontlist and backlist titles of the publishing companies which offers us a wide range. Opening of the backlist also means increased opportunities of giving a new lease of life to an old or classic title.
- Apart from the Market List, there will also be a Publisher’s Choice List of over 40 select titles comprising of the publisher’s choicest narratives that are being presented at the market.
- Empowering one-on-one meetings between authors, publishers, producers, and filmmakers, so that there is direct interaction between the change makers from both the literary as well as the film world.
“These are the best times for a storyteller. There is an unquenchable thirst for riveting stories across mediums, and we are constantly going back to our bookshelves and bookshops in search of magic that narratives deeply rooted in Indian sensibilities hold. The fourth edition of Word to Screen Market, therefore, is not just a B2B event where both book and cinema communities will just be gauging and figuring each other out. This will be a shared space where storytellers from both the communities will come together to explore opportunities from the vast literary wealth that we have in our country, and the real winner of this Market hopefully will be no one but the end target consumer – our readers, viewers and audience.” said Anu Singh Choudhary, Consultant and Expert, Publishing Industry Word to Screen Market 2019 at the occasion.
