New Zealand, Nov 27, 2005
The New Zealand Herald
East Asia did it with Jackie Chan and Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon - is it Bollywood's
turn to add some serious garam masala to the global
cultural melting pot?
It has always been a substantial dish on its own
- according to Time magazine, the Indian industry
produces about 1000 films a year for a worldwide audience
of 3.6 billion, compared with Hollywood's 740
films for 2.6 billion viewers - but until recently,
99.9 per cent of its connoisseurs have been of Indian
extraction.
In New Zealand, dairies and spice shops have stocked
Hindi and Telugu movies since the 1970s, and dedicated
Indian video stores have popped up in the past decade,
as South Asian immigration increased. The Capitol
Cinema in Balmoral was turned into a Bollywood cinema
in the late 1990s, and four years ago, Raj and
Seema Sharma bought it and started screening films
daily.
They also wanted to import and distribute Bollywood
films, which was a Himalayan task: not so long ago,
virtually all Bollywood videos in New Zealand were
pirated. Nobody wanted to pay to see the films
at the Capitol and no video store wanted to pay for
legal copies because cheaper pirated copies were available
before the official ones.
So the Sharmas started taking
the pirates to court: they say they've taken 30 cases
so far, and claim that four companies have been pushed
to bankruptcy by the fines and damages awarded. "It's
very difficult to change the culture - it's the hardest
thing I've done in my life," says Raj. "But
we're right, and we're losing money [because of piracy]
and the producers are losing money."
Capitol isn't the only legal Bollywood distributor
in New Zealand, but it's thanks to its efforts to
stamp out the scalpers that about 15 to 20 "mainstream"
rental stores around the country - including United
Video and Blockbuster branches - are willing to stock
Bollywood films. And now that they can show films
virtually the same day as they're released in India,
even multiplex cinemas, those bastions of mainstream
entertainment, have started experimenting with Bollywood.
About four months ago, both Hoyts at Wairau Park
(supplied by Capitol) and Village Skycity cinemas
in Manukau and Queen St (supplied by Dream Productions)
started showing Bollywood films. The moderately-sized
audiences are mostly Indian, but as the odd Bollywood
film slips into the festival seasons and films such
as Monsoon Wedding appeal to non-Indian audiences,
the multiplex owners hope the audience will broaden.
It helps that Bollywood has started wooing its non-resident
Indian audiences with films set in Melbourne and Vancouver.
And in New Zealand: over 100 feature and TV ad crews
have landed in Queenstown alone. The 1999 hit Say
I Love You (Kaho naa pyaar ha), which was set partially
in the alpine town (rather than just using it as random,
unexplained scenery as is often the case), has been
credited for helping increase the number of Indian
tourists to Aotearoa from 3000 to 18,000 a year. But
the number of Indian crews heading to Godzone has
diminished in the past couple of years - because of
the high New Zealand dollar, better government incentives
elsewhere and cheaper labour closer to home in Malaysia,
Thailand or even Prague.
While the New Zealand film industry has benefited
from American interest, New Zealand production companies
which help Bollywood film crews argue that given the
industry's fickle nature, it's safer to have more
than one foreign string to our bow. Or should that
be, more than one string to our sitar?
