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India Reveals Post-Coronavirus Film Shoot Protocol and Guidelines for Multiplexes

Naman Ramachandran
·2-min read

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The Producers Guild of India (PGI) has published a comprehensive protocol document that will govern shoots after the coronavirus pandemic subsides.

The 37-page “Back to Action’ protocol explains hygiene matters such as mandatory hand-washing, triple-layer mask and gloves, the avoidance of handshakes and shared cigarettes, and how two metres of social distancing should be maintained.

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It lays out training drills and how one or two dedicated team members, called Anti-COVID Boys, must be made available to implement the rules. Two junior doctors and a nurse must also be available for the first three months after shootings resume; and an ambulance must be on standby at all times. It also recommends that some tasks are better done from home.

Meanwhile, industry tracker Ormax Media has published a survey conducted across 58 Indian cities and towns that reveals that 28% of audiences are ready to return to cinemas as soon as they reopen. However, 47% said that they would wait two to three weeks before deciding, while 19% would wait two to three months.

In a webinar on building trust with audiences held last week, leading multiplexes PVR and Inox explained the sanitization and distancing measures that cinemas will adhere to after reopening. However, Shibashish Sarkar, Group CEO of Reliance Entertainment, said that his company would wait until the last quarter of 2020 before releasing big-ticket films like “Sooryavanshi,” starring Akshay Kumar, and “83,” starring Ranveer Singh, in cinemas. At the webinar, PGI president Siddharth Roy Kapur hazarded an educated guess that production is likely to resume with smaller units in the last week of June or early July.

India, which opened its domestic aviation sector on Monday, has 139,000 coronavirus cases with 4,021 deaths, according to official figures from the Ministry of Health.

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