Anurag Kashyap breaks with cliches Image: Amy Sussman/Getty Imagesīut does this shift mean that Bollywood mainstream films will eventually die out? Greater cinematic diversityĪnu Singh, Indian filmmaker, award-winning journalist and screenwriter, does not see a crisis in mainstream cinema. His internationally acclaimed 2016 film "Raman Raghav 2.0," inspired by the serial killer of the same name, brought a darker, neo-noir edge to Indian cinema. "Arthouse filmmakers entered the scene, suddenly Indian films were showing at the Cannes Film Festival."Īnurag Kashyap, for example, is a successful Hindi language director who also produces and writes screenplays that break the Bollywood mold. "Suddenly there were many more female filmmakers and films without stars that had a good story and that worked, that got by on much smaller budgets," Holl said. Independent filmmakers saw an opportunity and took it. He said the films were increasingly flat and formulaic. "What was tried and true didn't work anymore, there was a lot of uncertainty," said Stephan Holl, arguing that the crisis was homemade, and that people relied too much on the stars to fix it. In the early 2010s, box offices saw the first big flops. In addition, recurring Hindi mainstream cinema plots were becoming tired and clicheed. There were too few female producers and directors. Bollywood had a 95% market share in India at the time," Holl told DW, adding the movies included the early films starring Shah Rukh Khan, real evergreens that people loved." Bollywood's 'homemade crisis'īut Bollywood's recipe for successful also left a bad taste. "We brought Bollywood and Indian indie films to Germany. Rapid Eye Movies, actually an arthouse distributor, was partly responsible for a veritable Bollywood wave that took place throughout Europe a short time later. At the time, that was a big risk, but the move also promoted Indian cinema beyond Asia. Breakthrough in EuropeĢ001 was a pivotal year for Indian cinema, and for Stephan Holl, who with wife Antoinette Koester owns the Cologne-based Rapid Eye Movies film distribution company.įascinated with Indian cinema, they decided to distribute Indian films in Germany and Europe. Screenwriters and filmmakers had comparatively small profiles power during Bollywood's heyday. In the 1990s and 2000s, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan were the most famous outside India. The plot is almost always about love.īollywoodmovies were firmly in the hands of actors who also produced the biggest blockbusters. A Bollywood film can be a veritable roller coaster of emotions: tragedy and comedy alternate, as do action and romance. Over the decades, Hindi cinema developed a formula for success that includes the so-called nine rasas, or basic human emotions in traditional Indian arts - joy, fear, anger, love, courage, sadness, amazement, disgust and calmness. The movies are over three hours long and have an intermission and most feature singing and dancing. The Hindi film industry originated in Mumbai in the 1930s and had its first heyday in the 1960s and 1970s with romance films, dramas and action flicks. Romance plays a major role in Bollywood movies Image: Rapid Eye Movies/dpa/picture alliance US productions that set standards elsewhere in the world traditionally have little influence in India. The Indian film industry generates nearly $2 billion (€1.9 billion) a year. India produces more films than any other country worldwide, with Hindi-language films most strongly represented among the more than 1,000 productions a year. A film critic invented the word crossover in the 1970s to make one of the world's most successful movie industries more palatable to Western audiences.īollywood also stands for films made in the Hindi language, as opposed to India's other 120-odd tongues including Urdu, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Bengali - some of which also have their own film industry. " Bollywood" is a compound of the terms Bombay (the old name of the city of Mumbai) and Hollywood. Until 2011 the festival was actually called "Bollywood & Beyond" but the name was dropped because Indian cinema is so much more than mainstream Hindi-language movies. The Indian Film Festival in the German city of Stuttgart is taking place this week with live audiences for the first time since 2019.
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