So you want to start watching Indian movies. Where to begin? The truth is, there is no one single starting point for such a wide and varied industry—or rather, series of interconnected industries, subdivided by region and language, producing nearly 2,000 films a year.
Fandry (directed by Nagraj Manjule)
Combining the worlds of the colonialism period-piece, the Bollywood musical, and the increasingly popular cricket movie, Lagaan (2001) was India’s last Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, and with good reason. Rife with soulful choreography and musical numbers steeped in religious imagery, the film brings together a cast of wonderful characters from the Indian farmland as they try to figure out the English game of cricket—a full-blown obsession in India today—in order to fight the British crown’s needlessly cruel increase in taxes. A fantasy framed as the lost pages of history, the film presents some of Indian cinema’s most memorable heroes (such as Aamir Khan’s fiery Bhuvan, who leads the charge against the British Raj) and some of its most dastardly villains (Paul Blackthorne of Arrow fame as the venomous Captain Andrew Russell) in order to craft an underdog sports story with the grandeur of a historical epic.
Language: Bengali
Sarkar (directed by Ram Gopal Varma)
Forgoing the traditional fireworks of the Indian sports movie, Sudani from Nigeria (2018) digs deep between the layers of sports stories themselves, and unearths the reasons we love them. Sport, like religious and cultural tradition, connects us beyond race and language. Zakariya Mohammed’s comedy, which touches seriously upon the modern refugee crises, understands this intrinsically. Nigerian immigrant football (soccer) player Samuel (Samuel Abiola Robinson)—mistakenly thought to be yet another Sudanese player in the state of Kerala—is laid up in bed with a severe leg injury. He’s placed under the care of his poor club manager Majeed (Soubin Shahir), a man whose family life suffers because of his dedication to the game. There’s just one problem, though: Majeed and Samuel don’t speak a single common language. Both a comedy of errors and a heartfelt story about transcending boundaries, Sudani from Nigeria confronts both the anti-black racism prevalent in Indian society, and the national red tape that prevents immigrants from living lives of fulfillment, all set against a backdrop of well-meaning characters bound by an underfunded sport they love.
