Cinema India! - P.A.W. Print - Philadelphia Arts Writers

The world's largest film industry isn't called Hollywood, but Bollywood. That's with a "B," for Bombay. The Indian film industry rolls out over 800 titles a year, and claims a worldwide audience of 3 million viewers. But this fact hardly comes as a shock anymore to a growing number of American moviegoers. Theaters across the States, especially those located in regions with a substantial South Asian-American population, started offering late-night screenings of Bollywood hits a number of years ago. Indian-themed films with a wide crossover appeal, such as Bend it Like Beckham and Monsoon Wedding, have become household names on both sides of the Atlantic. Bollywood even received a nod from Broadway in Andrew Lloyd Webber's recent homage, Bombay Dreams.

Famous for their campy and often formulaic plot lines, exuberant musical numbers, and colorful costumes, Bollywood films might be striking a chord with American audiences nostalgic for "Golden Era" Hollywood classics from the 1940's and 1950's. Whatever the reason, it is clear that Bollywood has found a second home in contemporary American pop culture.

Radha Welt Vatsal is the director of the Cinema India!, a film series that started at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2002. This year, the series was shown at museums, cultural centers and independent theaters in nine cities along the east coast. In mid-July, Cinema India! played at the International House in Philadelphia. Vatsal is pleased that the films of her homeland are now gaining appeal in her adopted country. Her mission is to ensure that audiences in the States have the opportunity to experience a broader range of Indian cinematic offerings than what she believes is currently being seen in commercial theaters.


	Radha Welt Vatsal. photo, News India Times

"The films that play on what I call the 'South Asian ethnic circuit' are only the biggest Bollywood blockbusters, and they are mostly reaching just diehard Bollywood fans. There's still so much more out there, after you've gotten through the traditional classics. I'm interested in not only showing the biggest films India has to offer, but also the best films," Vatsal explains.

Under her direction, Cinema India! showcases South Asian films that span a wide range of decades, genres and styles. This year, the program offers six films in three South Asian languages, Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. All of them are presented with English subtitles. The lineup places the blockbuster musical extravaganza side-by-side with serious "art house" and independent films, a documentary, and films by younger directors who Vatsal says are moving mainstream Bollywood in new directions.

Mainstream Bollywood is represented in the Cinema India! showcase by Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Braveheart Will Take the Bride). This 1995 film has logged 426 weeks at a theater in Bombay and is the longest-running motion picture in the history of Indian cinema. Though it retains the traditional boy-meets-girl storyline that is the signature of mainstream Bollywood, Dilwale also explores cultural challenges faced by South Asians who have immigrated to western countries.

Two of the other films appropriate classic tales from western literature and re-envision them with Indian cultural themes. Kandukondain, Kandukondain (I Have Found It), borrows the characters from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, outfits them in saris and kurtas, and unleashes them on a rural Indian village. The moors of Scotland are traded for the shadowy gang-ruled underworld of modern-day Bombay in Maqbool, Bollywood's take on Shakespeare's Macbeth. Both films fully bring to life the social commentaries existing in the stories from which they are adapted, while reworking the tales to express problems and patterns specific to contemporary South Asian life.

Vatsal, who has a Ph.D. in Film History, hopes to expand the Cinema India! lineup and bring it to a larger number of cities in coming years. "I'm hoping that people who would usually never think to seek out an Indian film will come to watch this program at their local museum or cinema and say, 'This is something new and interesting, and maybe I'd like to see some more.'" She worries that in America, the term "foreign film" is too often perceived as being interchangeable with "dry and boring." The energy, color and music of the mainstream Bollywood movie could go a long way in correcting that misconception, she explains, while the deeper social and cultural themes thoughtfully explored by the independent South Asian film industries promote a greater understanding of people from varying ethnic and national backgrounds.

"The more kinds of films from around the world that a person is exposed to, and also enjoys," concludes Vatsal, "the more opportunity that person has to start empathizing with other peoples' dreams for their own lives and their hopes for the world at large."

The films Anything Can Happen, The Lady of the House and I Have Found It¸ will be screened at Cornell Cinema in Ithaca, New York, September 10 and September 12. Show times and venues of Cinema India! are listed at the organization's website www.cinemaindia.us.

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