About Filmi News
The trade paper for Indian cinema: how films get made, financed, sold and screened.
What we cover
Filmi News is a trade masthead. We report how Indian cinema gets made, financed, staffed, sold, distributed and shown: development and production, the financing stack and the rights layered on top of it, casting and crew, distribution deals territory by territory, exhibition and screen allocation, festivals and the markets running alongside them, and the crafts, music included, that a finished film is assembled from. Our reader works in it, or intends to. Two things about our structure are deliberate, and one of them is a correction. We file by what is happening rather than by language, because a distribution story is a distribution story whether the film is Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil or Telugu. And when we do name an industry, we name it, in full and alphabetically. There is no regional section here and no South Indian bucket. Grouping four large industries under one heading while listing two others by name is a ranking pretending to be a menu, and it is not one we are willing to publish. Every industry we cover is called by its own language, in the same typeface, in the same order every time. Filmi News has not started publishing yet, so this is the plan stated plainly rather than an archive. We report from Australia, which is why the overseas territory sits inside our coverage rather than at the end of it: buyers, importers, screen counts and diaspora returns are part of the business, not a footnote to it. The audience side of this subject is not ours. Whether a film is worth your Friday night, who is in it and where to stream it belongs to our sister masthead Jubliz, which covers Bollywood and Hollywood for the people watching rather than the people working. We will often write about the same film in the same week. Jubliz asks whether you should see it. We ask how it was financed, who it was sold to, and whether it earns the money back. Filmi News is published by SUKH SANDHU PTY LTD (ACN 679 292 392, ABN 49 679 292 392), an Australian company, and reports these industries from outside them.
How we work
We start from the documents the business actually runs on: the call sheet, the deal memo, the release schedule, the certification record, the exhibitor's programming grid. Where we describe a deal we say what kind of arrangement it is and who told us, and where a source cannot be named because speaking would cost them work, we say what kind of source is speaking instead. Collections, admissions and viewing figures are repeated only when we can state who counted them and by what method, and a number we cannot stand up is left out rather than rounded into a claim. Publicity material is labelled as publicity. We do not run verdicts on films, because judging a film is a different job from reporting the industry that made it, and craft coverage here asks how something was achieved rather than whether you will enjoy it. We do not report performers' private lives at all: it is not a trade story and it is not our business. We publish no personal information about individuals, and material shared with us in commercial confidence stays that way unless there is a clear public interest in publishing it. Coverage cannot be bought, we accept no junkets, gifts or paid travel, and we hold no interest in any studio, distributor, exhibitor, label or streaming service.
Corrections
Errors are fixed on the page, with a dated note at the foot of the story explaining what was wrong and what changed, and a note at the top as well when the error went to the point of the piece. On this beat the recurring mistakes are names, credits, transliterations, dates, deal terms and screen counts, so a correction always carries the right version rather than only admitting the wrong one. Where we have described a deal structure or published a figure incorrectly, the note states the corrected term or number in full, because a reader who has already quoted us in a meeting needs the right one in front of them. We do not quietly rewrite a published sentence and we do not delete a story to make a mistake disappear. Readers, and any company we have written about, can request a correction through the contact page, and we respond with a decision either way. Where a point is genuinely contested and we cannot settle it, the story says so rather than presenting one side as fact.
Who publishes this
Filmi News is published by Sukh Sandhu Pty Ltd, ACN 679 292 392, ABN 49 679 292 392, an Australian company based in Melbourne, VIC.