Indian Cinema

East Side Story As India celebrates the 75th anniversary of its independence, here’s a look back at the history of Indian cinema through the eyes of Uday Singh, managing director of the Motion Picture Association’s India office and an industry veteran of 26 years. Singh was interviewed by email.

Writing With Fire, Rintu Thomas and Shushmit Ghosh’s feature documentary debut tells the story of Khabar Lahariya, a female-run newspaper in northern India whose journalists are all Dalit, the lowest group in the Hindu caste system. Highly acclaimed, the film has won an audience award and special jury award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and is nominated for best feature honors by the International Documentary Association (IDA).

Fatma Begum, star of silent films in Indian cinema, is credited as having been the first woman director in the country, starting her career on the Urdu stage and later on setting up her own company, Fatma Films, after she had she segued into a career in film. Her first film as a director was the 1926 Bulbul-e-Paristan, the print of which is unfortunately lost; her last film was Goddess Of Luck, which she directed in 1929.

RadhaKrishna Parthiban is an Indian film actor, director, producer, and writer with over 70 films to his credit in Tamil cinema and a winner of the prestigious Indian National Award for films. In his latest venture Single Slipper Size 7, he takes on the challenge of being the director, producer, writer, and single actor.

Zoya Akhtar has made a name for herself in mainstream Bollywood, She is the only female director to have a string of very successful movies, and now the stars that turned her down in her early career would gladly work for her. Her latest film Gully Boy is India’s entry in the Oscar race as well as being submitted to be considered for the Golden Globe Awards.

When one hears the name Bollywood, what comes to mind, most often than not, are three-hour-long movies with song and dance no matter what the genre, movies driven by star power such as Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar. These stars will still shine but they seem to be losing a little bit of their luster as is evident from the latest box office figures, all recent films starring the four actors have opened with good box office numbers and then have taken a nosedive.

Documentary filmmaker Danny Ben-Moshe focuses on the Jewish community in India and their contributions to Indian cinema. In his latest endeavor Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema.

The Indian Film Festival in Los Angeles (IFFLA, April 5-9 at LA Live) has become “a teenager with all the good and the bad” that teens come with, chuckled the founder Christina Marouda during her opening speech, on Wednesday night. For those who have visited the festival in the past, this year’s growth is evident: It has moved to the slick LA Live Cinemas downtown, boasting greater capacity, state-of-the-art screening quality, and a youthful crowd as colorful and eclectic as ever.