SVF

How SVF Became The One-stop Shop for Bengali Entertainment

A café on Dover Lane. Mainak Bhaumik, awaiting the release of his next film, has a request straight off. “Please don’t ask me why SVF. No one seems interested in the film. Everyone has just one question: ‘You too?’ I have waited years to make this film. No producer would touch it in the way I envisaged it. Until SVF came along. It’s they who have given me a platform for what I had wanted to be my first film.”

It’s a view diametrically contradictory to what another film-maker has told me, of course on conditions of anonymity: “It’s a mafia. They control everything … the Don Corleone of the Bengali film industry, it’s a monopoly, they will destroy anyone who does not play by their rules.”

It’s a strong statement to make, even if anonymously, and there’s only one way to address it. Beard the lion in its den. And that is what I do.

Seated in his plush office on the eighteenth floor of Acropolis Mall, Mahendra Soni, the affable and articulate director and co-founder of SVF Entertainment, as opposed to the more taciturn co-founder director Shrikant Mohta, laughs. “Let people say what they like. Dev, Bumba da (Prosenjit Chatterjee) and so many others have opened production houses. A mafia wouldn’t have allowed that. We are transparent and bring passion to what we do. The number of first-time directors and actors who have worked with us and have come back to us wouldn’t have been possible if we were monopolistic.”