Pandemic forced the industry to shut shop; filmmakers like me have lived with this uncertainty all along, writes Devashish Makhija

2020 has been a watershed year in history, and that has also trickled down to the realm of entertainment. And after being a ‘relatively unknown’ filmmaker, despite making films for about a decade prior to this, I was flooded with offers, all of which I proceeded to turn down, to stay my course, the one I had set for myself over 10 years ago. The point I am trying to make here is this – although it seems to the world that the film industry has undergone a DNA-altering churn this year, and the audiences may never watch films in the same ways again, for a filmmaker like me, this is how my life always had been. With theatres caring less and less for our films, filmmakers like me have been in a pandemic-like production and distribution scenario for decades before the pandemic even arrived. We don’t know how our films will release, or if they ever will We don’t know what kind of money our films will recover, or if they ever will We don’t know who will produce our next film, or if it ever will get produced at all We don’t know who exactly our target audiences are, and how to reach them Despite critical acclaim, we often have to make each successive film at lower budgets than the previous one And so on some days, we’re not sure if we can even continue to make films anymore This ^ may sound like a list of insecurities and fears probably ALL filmmakers have to now confront at the fag end of 2020.