Filmmaker Imtiaz Ali has a simple frame for the OTT-versus-theatre debate: the phone gives you more, but it often gives it to you alone. Speaking on day one of a Mumbai film festival on 29 October, he said the post-COVID surge in digital viewing has changed not just what audiences watch, but how they feel while watching it.
The isolation of the small screen
Ali pointed to the post-pandemic shift. Audiences now consume far more material across reels, stories and streaming apps, but much of that happens on a personal device, alone. “These things are often watched in isolation,” he said. In a theatre, the same film lets people share an emotion with strangers around them.
His central contrast: the digital world isolates people, while the theatre offers a collective experience. He admitted he has no secret formula for making a film work, but said he hopes films keep working in cinemas and that people keep returning to the hall.
That shared response is the heart of his argument. “When I’m experiencing something, like an emotion, and the people around me are experiencing the same thing, it gives a very beautiful feeling,” he said. The theatre, in that sense, works as a multiplier: the room feels the same beat together, and the moment becomes larger than the film itself.
What Main Vaapas Aaunga taught him
The director reflected on Main Vaapas Aaunga, his star-crossed romance set during Partition and told through a present-generation lens. Finding both critical appreciation and commercial success, he said, was a matter of good fortune. The bigger lesson was that every filmmaker and artist should stay directly connected with audiences. Without that connection, he explained, “we are taking a shot in the dark.”
- Digital has multiplied viewing, but much of it is solitary.
- Theatre’s edge is a shared, collective emotional response.
- Direct filmmaker-audience contact can reduce guesswork about what lands.
- Ali is writing his next story and has not locked actors yet.
Why the distinction matters now
For fans and the trade, Ali’s comments land inside a longer conversation about what still pulls people back to cinemas. His argument is not that streaming is inferior; it is that convenience and connection are different jobs. A phone can serve a hundred clips a day, but a theatre is built for one shared moment. For an industry still relearning theatrical behaviour after the pandemic, that distinction helps explain which stories deserve the big screen and which release choices should protect the collective experience.
He did not reveal details of his next film, saying only that a story is being written, that he does not yet know whether it will be contemporary or a romance-drama, and that he has no actors in mind.
Source: Hindustan Times