All you have to do to watch this 90-minute coming-of-age English feature film is enter a password.

The password is: ipromisenottohateit

Before you can watch the film here, here are the disclaimers:
1. Given limitations of streaming video online, this is the best size we could manage. Please watch with headphones for better audio quality. If you are not happy with this picture quality, the film will be able on home video in India (through Moser Baer) and through video on demand (through Tata Sky) from mid-February 2009.

2. This is a low budget independent film made with a budget of Rs. three and a half lakhs and resources available at that point of time. At best, it’s a half decent effort, a five on ten film, which is also the reason you get to watch it free.

3. Play and Pause immediately to let the page load (Just like how you watch videos on Youtube). Depending on your internet connection, it may take around 10-40 minutes for you to load each of the two parts and you can start watching even if has buffering suggests only half of it is over because by the time you get to the halfway mark, the rest of it would have loaded too. So I suggest you let Part 2 load as you are watching Part 1. Part 3 is just the end credits, goofs and outtakes – and it’s three minutes long only because we have a long list of people to thank. So if you want to make a hit-list of all people responsible for this misadventure, don’t miss Part 3.

Do feel free to report any errors or problems faced in loading the page and I will do my best to assist you.

And those of you who have blogs, please feel free to spread the word and inflict it on the world. And please tell your friends not to embed the videos on to their blogs because as producers, we could flag the sites and report copyright violation. A link to this, however, will be appreciated.

This is for the first time in the world that a filmmaker is showing his entire feature length film online and free.

And that’s because I want more people to have heard about the film and I hope that the word-of-mouth will help boost the DVD and home video sales in February 2009.

Those who will download will anyway do so anyway and those who want to support the film will anyway buy DVDs… So I’m guessing no harm done here by this experiment.

Feedback on the film is welcome too. But remember what you typed as the password.

Have a that-four-letter-word-in’ time!
Cheers!
Sudhish Kamath

This happens to be our most fun experience on national television and the most embarassing one. The talk show with Ranvir and Vinay was a blast. It was recorded on the same day as the India-Pakistan T20 final.

Cary and me were in the dressing room watching the last two overs of the match before the show trying not to get stressed out by the fact that we hardly spoke Hindi, only to get all the more stressed by that high-tension thriller…

As the Pakis needed 13 of the last over, the entire crew of Ranvir Vinay aur Kaun including the hosts stormed into the green room. And you can imagine the excitement.

Even the normally cricket-indifferent Cary was all hooked to it and Ranvir turned cynical after the six. But soon Misbah hit the shot he will never ever try again all his life as Sreesanth caught it and the room erupted with screams and celebrations…

What a way to start the shoot…

Yes, it was a sentimental shoot for Cary, Ranvir and me because Ranvir had been part of the film since 2002 ever since I met him and Cary for an interview when they were both VJs. We had come a full circle and now Ranvir was interviewing us.

Truly an honour!

Thank you Ranvir Paaji and Vinay… You made us feel at home and never have we enjoyed digs at us more!

And thanks Darshan, for being the official TFLW TV show tracker/recorder.

Thank you, Channel [V] for supporting us and giving us as much visibility as any mainstream film.

Thanks to Bhumika at Fun Cinemas, we’re all set to release in Mumbai from September 28. Watch out for the promos on TV.

You can find the full episode here. Don’t miss Kiruba talking about blogs in it.

Thank you, Sunayana, for this half-page write-up… Awesome! Considering you had to jot it all down over phone… You’re a rock star!!

For the record, a couple of small corrections/clarifications:

1. The article says 72 per cent of TFLW was shot in 3 weeks.
About 85 per cent of the film was actually shot in 12 days. The 72 per cent stat is about the occupancy during the 3 weeks we played at Sathyam Cinemas.

2. The problem in finding child actors who can speak English without any accent was to make sure that regional flavours don’t restrict the market for a universal story. Generally, Bombay audiences have their strict bias against anything even remotely South Indian.

I had got an email from Anant Shiva, a friend of Sagaro’s, inviting me to send in That Four Letter Word for the Screenplayer Film Festival. Apparently, the festival is only for short films and they have made an exception to showcase TFLW because of its ‘making’ story, I hear.

All a filmmaker wants is for more people to see his film. (Sagaro: Don’t take that to mean that you can put up a copy online if you have one). I’m glad that some of you in Singapore will be able to see the movie.

One of my school buddies and old dumb charades mate Amal Kiran is planning to organise a screening for his students. Amal knows the guys we’ve based the film on. So it would be interesting to see how he reacts to the film because he hasn’t seen it himself yet.

I just got an email informing me that the film has been selected in the non-competitive section of the South Asian Film Festival, Bangladesh.

I had submitted my film after one of the festival programmers from India had asked me to send in the film.

The festival is between August 1 and 10 in Dhaka and Chittagong. The screening schedule should be put up on July 25 on the official site.

I’m yet to decide if I should go or not mainly because of the political turmoil in Dhaka. Besides, flying there is too expensive and the only other option is to fly to Kolkata and take a bus or train to Dhaka.

I’m tempted to go there because this is only the second International film festival that the film has been selected for after the Premiere in Chennai.

Now, I don’t feel too bad spending money couriering films around the world. Each time I send through DHL, it costs me Rs.2400.

I remember filling up the entry form of the Milano Film Festival, Italy in the middle of the night and it took me nearly two hours because they had word limits for everything. Once I hit Submit, I got a message saying that the film DVD should reach them within the next 48 hours. It was 2 in the morning. I rushed out to take my bike and rode to the DHL centre near the airport after packing a DVD with the cleanest inlay cards that were available at home. I got there and found out it was going to cost me that much. I wasn’t even carrying that kind of money and since I didn’t have much of a bank balance either, I paid partly by cash and partly by card. They said it would take 3 days to reach Milan, Italy and that was a chance I was willing to take.

And then, I got home to do a little more reading on the festival and I found this link that took me to submission statistics. Some 2400 plus films had been submitted last year. This year, they have 2550 entries.

I read that they would select about 12 feature films in all.

I don’t think I need to do the math to figure out that I just lost 2400 bucks in one night.

Post Script:
The results for the Milano Film Festival will be out on August 1. If you believe in miracles, please pray.