National Post, Canada Thursday, January 11, 2007
Bollywood comes to screen near you Canada: 'A Melting Pot': Tonight's premiere in Toronto a first for an Indian film
Rakshande Italia, National Post, with files from Melissa Leong Published: Thursday, January 11, 2007
When the stars of a made-in- India blockbuster walk down the red carpet outside a downtown Toronto theatre tonight for the world premiere of a Bollywood film, the star-studded event is the first time such a gala debut of a mainstream Indian movie has been held internationally, evidence of Canada's growing clout in this burgeoning and increasingly lucrative niche market.
In a climate where the biggest Bollywood films can now draw more audiences than Hollywood movies in some Canadian theatres, and where even some of the country's biggest movie chains have begun screening Indian films, tonight's star turn by Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan, whose movie Guru premieres at the Elgin &Winter Garden Theatre, is to be expected.
Over the past five years, AMC and Cineplex Theatres have begun screening Bollywood movies at locations across Canada, including Surrey, B.C., Calgary, Alta., and a number of communities in Ontario.
When one of Cineplex's Surrey theatres ran a Hindi movie as an experiment about three years ago, the film out grossed the Hollywood movies playing at the cinema.
"We knew we were on to something," said Pat Marshall, vice-president of communications and investor relations, at Cineplex Entertainment.
"Canada is such a melting pot that we [saw] that there was an opportunity to provide films that enhance what we already provide."
The Canadian distributor of Guru, a rags-to-riches tale about the late Indian business tycoon Dhirubhai Ambani, says the city was chosen for tonight's world premiere because it is deemed to have a highly receptive audience primed for Indian films.
"In two years' time, the market for these films will be as big as U.K.'s," predicted Roger Nair, the distributor. "It's huge there because it's not just Indians going to see them."
Canada certainly boasts a captive market for such films. Statistics Canada projects that immigration trends will make South Asians the country's dominant visible ethnic group by 2017, with a projected 1.8 million South Asian population. According to the 2001 census, 917,000 individuals identified themselves as South Asians.
The recent Bollywood movie, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (Don't Ever Say Goodbye) ran for more than eight weeks in theatres across Canada this summer -- grossing $650,000 in Toronto alone.
Nav Bhatia, the Mississauga businessman who marketed Don starring Hindi film superstar Shahrukh Khan, says the movie netted $400,000 in the first 10 days of its November launch. He estimates that the Canadian Bollywood industry is roughly $40-million.
"Multiplexes know we have grown, and they can't ignore us anymore," said Mr. Bhatia.
Other companies are also recognizing the demand: Canadian telecommunications giant Telus is sponsoring the film Guru and will be offering its customers exclusive movie content through their mobile phones.
The Toronto International Film Festival featured a record number of Hindi films this year. And Toronto filmmaker Deepa Mehta's Water -- a Hindi movie -- is Canada's official entry in the foreign film category for the 2007 Oscars.
Bollywood movies are being made with an eye on the overseas markets -- appealing to the large expatriate communities with equal parts nostalgia and glamour.
Foreign locales, glamorous, skinny models in mini-skirts, the use of more English and slick photography are meant to attract the second-generation Indians known as NRIs, or non-resident Indians.
That is, people like Aseem Jafer. The Canadian-born IBM employee was 28 when he saw his first Bollywood movie, visiting India to marry wife Sakeena Sultana in a traditional arranged Muslim marriage.
"Now, I've almost forgotten Hollywood -- it's Bollywood for me, even my cousins here are amazed,'' Mr. Jafer said, outside an AMC theatre in Oakville, recently where he had come to see Lage Raho Munnabhai, an award-winning comedy about a man meeting the ghost of Mahatma Gandhi.
His family hits the local theatres for Bollywood features three times a month; his son is growing up humming Indian songs.
"When you go to a Bollywood film, people show up in families, where traditional movie-goers are groups of two," said Ms. Marshall, the Cineplex vice-president.
Golden Theatres, which plays Bollywood movies at two of its cinemas in Toronto's suburbs, does even more to elicit that nostalgia for families.
"Just like back home, we create the Indian ambience with samosas and chai served during the interval," said Farzan Dehmoubed, vice-president, and a partner of Golden Theatres, which has been around for more than 15 years.
The interval, which usually runs 15 minutes, allows the public to go out for refreshments and is a necessary break in a Hindi movie, which can stretch more than three hours. It also signals a turning point or climax within the movie.
Rupal and Ashit Kapadia, who immigrated to Toronto from Mumbai six years ago, looked forward to Hollywood movies back home. Now that they're in North America, they miss the "nach-gana- (song and dance) that is bite-sized pieces of our lives in India."
"We cherish Bollywood, although they glorify reality and dress them up like a warm, dark chocolate cake,'' said Ms Kapadia, a senior analyst at a Toronto bank.
"Globalization has made the mainstream aware of our movies," added her husband, noting the growing numbers of non-Indians in the audience -- "even if it means reading English subtitles."
As the popularity of Bollywood increases in the mainstream media, it is posing new challenges for some of the smaller- screen theatres that have remained its devoted fans for years.
Shafik Rajani, president and owner of Raja Cinemas, which has shown Indian movies in B.C. for 12 years, said its big crowds have shrunk in recent years.
He once had six cinemas, but now has only two in Vancouver.
"We used to have line-ups and sold-out shows for months but unfortunately recently, it's gone downhill," he said.
"It's been slowing down recently because it's going mainstream."
"In the U.K., they don't show it in private theatres anymore. They only show it on the big screens. I think that's coming [here]."
Still, Mr. Rajani is not deterred: "We'll continue until the time ends, until we can do it no more because we love it."
"All of the [movies] are like the Titanic. They're all love stories. People love that kind of stuff." (c) National Post 2007
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges