Leveraging The Film Tourism Potential

In a first, a significant highlight of the event included the Film Tourism Seminar organised by OptiMICE Events, an exciting new initiative to take the concept of Film Tourism to the next level.

Research has shown the power of film in portraying a positive destination image to induce tourism visits to a place. It has also noted that locations where a successful film had been shot demonstrated a 54% increase in tourism visits over the following four years – definite proof that Film Tourism is a growing phenomenon worldwide and its enormous trickledown benefits.

The panel for the Film Tourism Seminar included Sandeep Marwah, Owner-Marwah Studios and Founder Noida Film City; Aashish Singh, Vice President- Yashraj Productions; Khyati Nayak, Head-Film Facilitation, Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Ltd; Udayan Baijal, Producer-Jamun Production; Urmila Sant Joint Director General, Archaeological Survey of India; Alok Mathur, Group General Manager-IRCTC; Shubhendu Sarkar, PRO, BSF; Sujoy J Mukherjee, Producer-Filmalaya Pvt Ltd and Kamal Gill, Executive Editor and Managing Director, Gill India Group.

While introducing the panellists, Kamal Gill spoke about location and films being two sides of the same coin, commenting, “Films do a lot for locations what locations do for films and when we use the word ‘train,’ we are referring to destinations. She referred to Indian monuments and their presence in almost every film, noting how the Archaeological Survey of India is the guiding force behind the filming of these monuments, providing the know-how to producers and directors on how and where to shoot their films.

Khyati Nayak, Head-Film Facilitation, Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Ltd, was thankful to OptiMICE for introducing a platform where the film fraternity and the tourism industry could interact with each other. She said the Gujarat government would be more than willing to help the film industry to enhance its filmmaking in future in all possible ways. Alok Mathur, General Manager, IRCTC, was all smiles when he said, “When we think of trains I am proud to say that we have the world’s most luxurious train, the Maharaja Express, which has been filmed very often and has the distinction of being the winner of the WTA Award for the last five years.”

Sujoy Mukherjee, Producer/Director, Filmalaya Studios, and son of late actor Joy Mukherjee, said he has a penchant for filming in famous Indian monuments such as Taj Mahal, where he took the liberty of going deep inside the Taj to shoot a film recently.

An interesting piece of information thrown up by the panel was the existence of Border Tourism, which comes under the purview of the Border Security Force, and that film makers have to abide by certain rules and regulations for filming movies at the borders.