Sheffield International Documentary Festival
2002

Bollywood Bound
Nisha Pahuja

Dolan Cummings

Canadians emigrate to India in search of fame and fortune. Even if it means missing an opportunity to make a cheap jibe about Canada, you have to admit it's an odd idea.

But the world is more complicated than it often appears, and Bollywood Bound is all about the peculiar global attraction of the Indian film industry. We are introduced to four Canadians of Indian descent, who have achieved varying degrees of success in Bollywood, where their Western influence seems to be considered an asset.

This paradox is at the heart of the story. Ruby Bhatia, a former Miss Indian Canada, is the most successful (and the most bigheaded) of the four. She complains at one point that she is too Indian for Canada and too Canadian for India, but then she also complains that the Indians keep telling her to 'stop being so bloody Indian'. When she isn't introducing pop videos on Star TV, she is swanning about in rags playing the pious Hindu. The funniest scene is when she announces to a hall full of schoolchildren how she refused to do a programme sponsored by Benson & Hedges: 'I lost money, but that's OK.'

If Ruby provides the comic turn, the most interesting character is young Neeru, who at the time of filming was still trying to get her first screentest. Neeru claims never to have felt at home in Canada, and this spiel is accompanied by mocked-up footage of her walking along a high school corridor in a sari, with the other students pointing and staring. It isn't very convincing. Neeru seems like an ordinary Canadian girl to me, and a desire to be different hardly sets her apart.

When she gets to Bombay, and things aren't working out for her, Neeru quickly has a change of heart. 'I hate this fucking city!' Her frustration is neatly captured when she tries to call her parents from a phone box as a truck trundles past, with an audience of street urchins watching as she shouts the hotel phone number over and over again. In this way the individual stories are strangely wedded to the broader themes.

Bollywood Bound tells us less about Bollywood that it does about the complicated relationship between culture, ethnicity and taste. It is a fascinating and spectacular journey.

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