Illegal Porn Shoots Flourish In Goa With State Becoming The De facto Porn Destination

PANAJI: The picturesque coastal State of Goa now has a new tag – that of a de facto porn destination. And not surprisingly so. With the OTT porn Industry flourishing in India and big businesses wanting a piece of the pie, (read here) places like Mumbai suburbs, Surat, Meerut and Goa are fast becoming the hubs for the porn business.

If the Poonam Pandey Canacona Dam porn shoot was any indicator, the villages, dams, lakes and fields of the State have become an ideal locale for illegal and clandestine porn shoots. The Poonam Pandey porn clip got noticed only because the drama queen created a furor around her marriage by filing a police complaint against her newly-married husband and then retracting her case.

Locals recognized the Canacona dam in the background when the porn clip was released on her website and openly publicized on the internet. The judgement of the Goa court granting Poonam Pandey and her husband bail has become a precedent, which had emboldened several popular Indian adult or porn creators to head to Goa to shoot their videos and clips in the village-sides.

But other porn creators are far more discrete. Locations and landmarks are cleverly disguised so as not to reveal where the film  was shot.

And thanks to the pandemic, with international tourism on the back-burner or almost at a standstill, the hospitality industry in Goa is bending backwards to offer Indian tourists the red carpet.

Dubious cinematographers and videographers from all over the country are making a beeline for Goa. With the OTT boom in the world – almost 80 per cent of the outdoor porn shoots (of the Indian business) take place in deserted fields and farms in Goa.

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International porn studios are outsourcing porn content from India with the huge demand for Asian or Indo-Asian porn.

It’s very simple. There is no heavy equipment involved. Everything is now hand-held and very portable. The crew consists of about 6-`8 members, plus 3-4 actors and another 2 makeup artistes. The entire unit is not more than 12 to 14 hands which can easily fit in 3 Innova cars along with tripods, cameras, portable battery operated lights and reflectors, which is all the equipment required for an outdoor, daylight porn shoot.

The modus operandi is very simple. The entire unit lands in Goa during weekdays – to avoid expensive flight tickets and a bit of crowding during the weekends and checks into a 2 or 3 star guesthouse or resort – rooms are available for as less as Rs 1500 per day.

A day before the shoot, the camera man and his assistant will hire a bike and go in search of locations in the remote areas of the State. 2-3 locales are selected for the shoot.

The next day, the entire unit sets off early in the morning in 2-3 hired vehicles, mostly self-driven. The unit reaches the location and while the camera crew sets up the equipment after identifying the best angles and spots, the actors get their make up in place. It doesn’t take more than 30 minutes for ‘setup’ and the unit is ready to “roll”.

Scenes are shot in less than 2-3 hours. And the team is then ready to move to another location. Even before the locals get wind of what’s going on and raise an alarm, the unit has packed up and headed to a different location.

Most units do not need more than 2-2.5 hours at any particular location. Cameras are hand-held with only one tripod-mounted camera – that too is light-weight and can be easily shifted around. Only two battery-powered lights are used and many-a-times even those are not required as natural sun light provides adequate lighting for today’s hi-tech digital cameras.

According to an industry source, Indian porn OTTs like Flizmovies, Neufliks, Hotmasti, Chikooflix, Wetflix, Ullu, Kooku, DesiFlix, Hot Shots, Primeflix, Gup Chup, Flizmoviez, etc., prefer indoor shoots with hotel rooms the best shoot scene, the international ones use more of outdoor shoots – farm scenes, lake scenes, waterfall scenes etc., and Goa is the ideal location for such venues.

Many guesthouses and resorts in Goa are unknowingly part of the porn OTT boom in the country with the easily available and cheap rooms or houses – most of them not registered with the Goa Tourism department being an ideal location for porn content creators.

On an average, a 12- or 24-part episode can be produced with a Rs 24 lakh or Rs 50 lakh budget – on the higher side with each episode costing not more than Rs 2 – 2.5 lakh, with the producers making approximately Rs 1.5 to Rs 2 crore per film.

The films are directed by youngsters trained in Mumbai, or Bollywood, the world’s largest film factory. The units carry no banners and work from hotel rooms or rented apartments on budgets as low as Rs 1,25,000 to Rs 2,50,000 per episode.

According to media reports, an estimated 50 to 75 films are produced in multiple languages from Meerut, a town considered holy by many because it lies sandwiched between the Ganga and Yamuna rivers. In Mumbai, each nearly 200 films are produced each quarter.

Shot on DSLR cameras, the movies revolve around similar themes of a girl wooed by a delivery boy who lands up at her home to deliver food, or a lover who is also a classmate in college. The plots look similar, often copied from cheap South American sex videos.

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The budget may sound ridiculously low by Bollywood standards but suits the fly-by-night filmmakers who make four to five movies per year. Expectedly, the small OTT platforms are seeing a large growth in customers, says a MoneyControl.com report.

Ullu lists titles such as Call Centre, Kavita Bhabhi (one of the top five most watched web series during the COVID-19 quarantine in Asia), Mastram (which garnered several lakh views) Palang Tod, Taxi, Wife in a Metro, Charmsukh, Mona Home Delivery.

According to MoneyControl.com, the rates, in comparison with a Netflix of Amazon, are mind boggling. It is Rs 198 for a year and Rs 144 for six months. A three-month subscription is Rs 99 and you can have a five-day package for Rs 36 only. “It is creativity, it is realistic, it is not only sex, it is original content. It is all about you and me, what you see every day at home and in public,” Vibhu Aggawal, promoter of Ullu, and CEO and founder of steel company Jaypeeco India, said in a telephonic interview.

Anirudh, a producer whose platform Big MovieZoo launched Mary Aur Marlow says it woiuld be wrong to call these movies high on erotic content.

“Each movie has a storyline. Mary Aur Marlow has loads of comedy, it of course has some bold scenes. But it is a work of art.” He says he offers two offline videos for Rs 69, five offline videos for Rs 119 and 10 offline videos for Rs 399. His other popular movies are Redlight, Paap and Sattebaaz. While all these can be rated XX at most, there is other content which is XXX which is mostly shot in Goa.

The mhaka kiteak podla and susegaad attitude of local Goans, is another incentive for porn content creators who are more than happy to give the drivers an extra tip to disappear from the scene for a few hours.

Sometimes the porn scenes are even shot in the hired cars and tourist taxi vehicles or SUVs, with the local drivers standing down the road to alert the unit if any cops or vigilantes are passing by. Like they say – money makes the mare go.