Ritam, Founder Indian Film Project (IFP)
Ritam was 21 when he founded the India Film Project from his hostel room.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 22 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count. This is a record of a conversation from that day. No new quotes were added.
Key takeaways
- Ritam was 21 when he founded the India Film Project from his hostel room.
- IFP, as its fans fondly call it, started as a 50-hour filmmaking challenge with 600 participants in 2011 and went on to become the world’s largest filmmaking challenge with 36,000 participants in 2019 under Ritam’s vision.
- From its humble beginnings, IFP has established itself as one of the largest content festivals globally, participating and attended by over 65,000 people annually from over 30 countries.
Ritam was 21 when he founded the India Film Project from his hostel room. IFP, as its fans fondly call it, started as a 50-hour filmmaking challenge with 600 participants in 2011 and went on to become the world’s largest filmmaking challenge with 36,000 participants in 2019 under Ritam’s vision. From its humble beginnings, IFP has established itself as one of the largest content festivals globally, participating and attended by over 65,000 people annually from over 30 countries. IFP currently is a community of 7.5 lac filmmakers, writers, storytellers, musicians, photographers, and creators from various backgrounds.
Featured by Forbes recently, Ritam has been a TEDx speaker and a guest speaker at various forums talking about marketing, films, and entrepreneurship at events, startup, IPs, and MBA colleges. He is a mentor and consultant for a few media startups and was previously a columnist for DNA. He has been World Economic Forum’s chosen Global Shaper in the past.
When not at work, he is found between his love for Lego, Hot Wheels, and drones.
We talked with him about his journey with IFP and how technology could assist his vision of going globally with his idea.
How did the idea of IFP first strike you? When did you conceptualize it? #
The India Film Project (IFP) idea came somewhere around 2010 when I stayed with filmmakers. I witnessed their daily struggles to find collaborations. We had planned a project together, but it wasn’t executed. I found a slight gap between what the industry was offering versus how people were shaping up. I think that was one of the initial beginnings for me to conceive something that can bring filmmakers together. Since I was a kid, I have always watched many videos and international cinema. I had this entire notion that videos were a compelling medium. People whom I haven’t met, I could see them and feel their emotions in videos. Probably the thought that was in the corner of my head came alive when I saw a lot of filmmakers trying to do something essentially to create videos - and I thought, what if I can make a platform that can help them?
How had you planned for IFP to evolve over years? Has it been like you had planned? #
To be honest, I never planned IFP the way it has been growing. We have been planning one year at a time for the last ten years. The scenario has been very dynamically changing. In 2011, people wanted to become engineers and doctors, and a very few people wanted to be a filmmaker, mainly as a hobby. Now in 2021, people want to explore the creative field, and that’s a massive change in the industry. We believed that instead of planning and having a vision for the next five years, what if we understand the creators every year, understand the changing thought processes, and then plan the India Film Project (IFP) in a very tailor-made way for that particular year. I think that has helped us be very flexible with the changes coming up and probably give us an edge because each year, we go to the drawing board and rethink what new we want to do this year.
As an company, we foresee what we want to do in the next three years in terms of business, growth, and community.
Can you tell us about the various technologies involved in filmmaking and how has the usage of technological tools changed over the past few years?
If you had asked me this question five years back, I would have told you that there are a lot of technologies involved in filmmaking, right from choosing the camera to scripting software to post-production software to editing software to music software - a lot of things go behind making a film. It was always a complicated and costly process, and hence very few people could become filmmakers and create films.
Nowadays, people can create content and record it with a smartphone. I don’t think anyone needs to think about the various technological tools. DSLRs have changed how we capture the world around us and make films that tell stories that have a different tangent altogether. It has given people the power to live in small towns and not always come from well-to-do families to tell a story. I don’t think the equipment will matter anymore, and that will be the case with almost every technology used in the filmmaking process. The prime importance is to the content you create.
Why did you choose only the digital platform for IFP? Wouldn’t television or radio shows gain more popularity?
Now we are definitely expanding to different platforms. IFP started as a festival that was an on-ground experience. In 2015, we decided that the festival has to grow while staying the way it is an on-ground experience; we began increasing the social community via social media platforms.
In recent years, we have grown drastically in terms of television and radio shows. We have our own national radio show and two other shows, IFP Shorts and IFP Offshoot, telecasted weekly on MTV (a television channel). We are now expanding away from digital platforms into new means, and I believe that’s how the world is going to be shaped. Businesses would no longer survive on a single platform. they going to be in a multidimensional content outlet, and that’s what we are now trying to become.
Do you believe that the increased usage and ease access of smartphones and the internet has helped your idea reach a wider range of audience?
The core idea of IFP as a festival and community is to celebrate where people create, come together, and collaborate. Humans as a species have always deferred from other species because of our ability to create things. We started innovating things with science and arts, and that’s how we reached to become what we are today.
The core concept of the India Film Project is how to enable people to create more. More than the digital access, the increased popularity of creating content is what I think has benefitted the film industry. For instance, if you meet a 17 or 18-year-old who wants to become creators, they create fashion content or vlogs, or travel content. At least they try; even if they don’t pick it up as a profession, they are still trying to create something, which is our primary goal.
How do you organize these workshops (in which platform)?
The virtual Festival that we organized last year was on a platform specially designed to host IFP. Our team and ticketing partner, Hubilo, developed the platform from scratch, which could host more than 1.5 lac people and involve a lot of interaction. The idea was not to become a Zoom thing. the idea was to probably replicate the on-ground experience into a digital form in a more extensive form. Suppose you go to the platform (it’s still available). In that case, it has almost all the features that an on-ground festival has, e.g., stalls, spaces to meet new people, gaming experiences, etc. The motive has been to create a rock-solid platform. is our own and probably not dependent on third-party platforms.
Answering your question about technical glitches, I think whether you have an on-ground or online festival, if it is even one percent dependent on technology, there are high chances that it will have some glitch. I think the glitch is part and parcel of every execution now, and I see it as a usual way and not as a technical problem. Though we have never hit a large glitch because what we have been following ever since we’ve gone digital is - we will test everything robustly before making it go live, even if it means that you need to invest a lot of resources in resting. You can’t put out a half-baked product for people, so I think the more we test, the lesser the glitch we usually encounter.
COVID has hugely affected the entire film industry. What’s the impact of the pandemic on the IFP platform? What new strategies did you implement to overcome it?
The biggest impact COVID had on us is that we couldn’t do the festival on-ground like each year. IFP festival is always about the experience of meeting new people. Fortunately, the internet broke the barrier for us, people from more than 42 countries could participate and attend the festival this year. It was a significant accomplishment for us because not everyone can find time and energy to travel to Bombay to attend the festival. It also meant that we had to focus on a lot of things that creators were suddenly going through.
Many creators were going through a phase of having no work, minimal money to survive, difficulty exploring new opportunities, and finding it even more difficult to tweak themselves in the current times.
We, as a community, thought about how we could do something to help them sell solve this problem. We had to design many programs that were about focusing on the creator’s mental health and creating collaborative spaces so that creators who couldn’t meet otherwise could actually use IFP as a platform to collaborate. With Covid, we had to change and, pivot a lot of new things. The good part is that we have also explored virtual as a space for conducting festivals and got to understand the new side of the creator community - both of them have proved that we have become even more empathetic about the creator ecosystem. Now, we also probably now know how to put technology to a better use.
How do you track the entries for the virtual events? Do you track the people who join your workshops?
All the entries that come in for the virtual festival is through a new platform that we built. This was a ticketed entry so every time someone bought ticket, we could actually find it and track it.
Going forward, what is your vision for IFP in the next decade and what role would emerging technologies be playing in executing that vision?
The vision is to take IFP as a content community and as a festival across multiple continents. We found that creators almost everywhere don’t have a rock-solid ecosystem for them. they don’t have a community that is continuously striving for them, which is what we want to become. So, the idea is to probably engage with more international creators and reach to them using IFP as a medium.
Questions and answers #
What is the main point? #
Ritam was 21 when he founded the India Film Project from his hostel room.
What else did the original piece say? #
IFP, as its fans fondly call it, started as a 50-hour filmmaking challenge with 600 participants in 2011 and went on to become the world’s largest filmmaking challenge with 36,000 participants in 2019 under Ritam’s vision.