Karnataka’s deadline for state film award applications for films from 2022 and 2023 was 31 October 2026. Entries had to be submitted on Blu-ray. According to the director Mansore, when the selection committee tried to screen his film Act-1978, the disc failed and they watched it off a pen drive instead.
He has asked the government to fix all of this, in a press release reported by The Hans India on 23 October. We should say up front that this is one source and a producer’s own statement, with no response yet from the Department of Information and Public Relations. The arithmetic in it, though, is checkable, and it is the kind of thing nobody bothers to write about.
The numbers he is objecting to
Application fees, per his account: ₹16,193 for a 2022 film and ₹18,621 for a 2023 film. Charged separately for the awards and for the subsidy. So a producer applying for both, across both years, could be spending somewhere between ₹50,000 and ₹60,000 per film simply to be considered.
Documents have to be submitted twice, in duplicate sets, once for awards and once for subsidies. Mansore points out that the National Film Awards do not require this.
And the film has to be on Blu-ray. He proposes the obvious alternatives: a pocket hard drive, a DCP, or an MOV file. His two questions are the whole case: “If the work can be completed using a pen drive or pocket hard disk, why insist on Blu-ray?” And: “Even from the perspective of content security, would an open DCP format not be sufficient?”
He has asked the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce to take it up.
Three things wrong here, not one
The format. Blu-ray authoring is a specialist job that most Indian post houses no longer do as routine. It costs money, takes days, and produces an object that fewer and fewer machines can play. A DCP is the format cinemas actually use. A drive is what everyone in the industry already exchanges. Mandating the one medium nobody works in any more is not a security measure, it is an administrative habit.
The fee. Charging a producer close to twenty thousand rupees to be considered for an award, and again for the subsidy, inverts what a subsidy is for. The films that need state support most are the ones for which ₹20,000 is a real decision. A Kannada film made for thirty or forty lakh is being asked for half a percent of its budget as an entry fee to apply for help.
And the backlog nobody mentions. It is almost November 2026 and Karnataka is collecting entries for films released in 2022. That is a four-year lag on the 2022 cohort. A state award delivered four years late is not an incentive, a marketing asset or a career marker. It is a certificate.
The pen drive detail is the one to keep
If his account is accurate, the mandated format failed in the room it was mandated for, and the committee fell back on exactly the medium he is asking to be allowed to use.
That is the whole argument settled by accident. The rule did not protect the content, did not enable the screening, and cost the producer money to comply with. The workaround was the thing the rule exists to prevent.
Bengaluru Baath Take
This month we have written about a Karnataka welfare cess that the High Court has effectively suspended for everyone who hired a lawyer, and about Karnataka audiences sending ₹85 crore to a Tamil film and leading the country in pre-sales for a Hindi one. See the cess story and the Ramayana pre-sales numbers.
Put this alongside them and a pattern appears. Karnataka has a large, enthusiastic, high-spending film audience and a state film administration that is still working on 2022.
Nothing Mansore is asking for needs a budget line, a committee or legislation. Accept a DCP or a drive. Take one set of documents for both applications. Set the fee at a level a thirty-lakh film can pay. Clear the backlog so an award arrives while the film is still remembered.
And since the KFCC has been asked to intervene, this is a reasonable test of what it is for. The Chamber spends a great deal of energy on showcount and release dates for big films. A twenty-thousand-rupee entry fee on a four-year-old backlog is the sort of thing that only ever hurts its smallest members, which makes it exactly the thing worth spending that energy on.
We have asked nobody and heard nothing back, because this is one press release. If the Department of Information and Public Relations wants to tell us the fees are different or the backlog is shorter, we will print it.
Sources
Single-sourced, from the director’s own press release. The government has not responded publicly and we have not independently verified the fee figures.
