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Essay by mvmayank9University, Master'sA+, October 2014

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INDIAN FILM INDUSTRY - An Overview

The Indian film industry is the largest in the world in terms of number of movies produced. The industry is quite old. It has come a long way - from the first motion pictures brought to India by Lumiere Brothers in the form of soundless short films in 1896, to India's first commercially successful silent feature film King Harishchandra in 1913; to Indian filmmakers making films in English such as Delhi Belly. Rightly so, in 2013 Indian cinema completes 100 years! The Indian film industry produces more than 1,000 films every year in 52 languages and over 3.7 billion tickets are sold annually. There are over 400 production houses in the country with 32 corporate houses in the business of film production. The film industry provides employment to over 60 lakh people and its current turnover is crossed Rs.12,000 crores for the year 2010.

The turning point for the industry came in the year 2001, when the government according industry status for the film industry. The sector was earlier dependent on private film financiers who used to charge exorbitant rates of interest and there were also concerns regarding money laundering with many of the anti-social elements getting involved in film financing. The granting of the industry status facilitated securing of finances from financial institutions at affordable rates and brought in the much needed transparency in the industry. Individual investors were the leading contributors to non-traditional film financing accounting for 64% of the corpus, followed by IPO's which accounted for 16% of finance. A new source of film finance is the TV broadcaster becoming an equity investor by buying TV rights in perpetuity from the film producer.

An interesting trend in the Indian film industry is the growing success of Indian movies abroad.

Indian films...