We need to make films that strike a chord with both rural and urban audience: Hiten Kumar

While urban Gujarati films have been hitting the headlines after a complete revival of the industry and relentless efforts by the filmmakers, the rural films, on the other hand have been in the line of fire due to various reasons. The year 2018 proved to be a bad one for the rural film industry with no films being produced by the industry. And this has been a worrying sign.
Talking about it, yesteryear superstar Hiten Kumar opines that the urban-rural divide has had a negative impact on the industry and it has amounted to the audience getting divided and a change in the way rural films are perceived by city audience has further impacted the overall growth.“We are going the wrong way,” says Hiten Kumar, who blames it on the multiplex culture as well as filmmakers who in their bid to woo urban audience, have started making films that find no connect with the audience outside of bigger cities. He adds, “The so called urban films have no connect with people in small towns and the audience in the cities don’t like rural films. So due to this divide, we have started making niche films. Earlier, when there were only single screen theatres, all kinds of films were released and everyone watched those films together under the same roof. But now, it has been divided into multiplexes, that are meant for the sophisticated audience and single screen theatres that belong to the rural audience.”