The Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival with Star is hosting the fourth edition of its flagship property— Word to Screen Market. The event will be hosted on September 23 in Mumbai and is expected to be attended by stalwarts from the publishing 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 auction 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 other. The books listed up for autioning this year are not only the frontlists of publishing houses but also their backlists, that are rich with undiscovered gems.
According to sources, stories will be presented to over 40 content creation companies among which are some of the world’s significant production houses including 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.
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.”
The platform has significantly grown over the past three years, and over 550 titles ranging across 30 genres - thrillers, romance, spy drama, paranormal among others, will be presented this year. There will be titles across eight languages— Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada.
A total of 21 publishers will be participating in this edition including HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Juggernaut Books, DC Books and others. It will have 24 authors including New York-based award-winning author Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, Sundari Venkatraman, Jagran-Nielsen, Satya Vyas, Nikhil Sacchan, Nilotpal Mrinal and many others.“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,” said Anu Singh Choudhary, Consultant and Expert, Publishing Industry Word to Screen Market 2019.
