The new Bollywood: no heroines, no villains.

Mentioning the word 'Bollywood' usually elicits eager claims of familiarity. After all, Monsoon Wedding and Bride and Prejudice were international hits. But even though the directors, Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha, respectively, pay tribute to the celluloid phenomenon they grew up with, their works are essentially Western crossover films. One character in Bride and Prejudice characterizes Bollywood dancing as "petting a dog with one hand and screwing in a light bulb with the other."

Most people might be familiar with snippets of Bollywood via Western musicals, video clips or DJ remixes. But Bollywood is much more than movie characters breaking out in a funny dance. A typical film is two- and-a-half hours long, taking its time to unroll storylines of epic proportions, often involving the breakup and make-up of extended families. Some six to eight songs and intricate choreography, in which the actors themselves participate, are used to emphasize the story's emotional high points.

That Bollywood formula is sometimes described as masala, which actually means a mixture of food spices. In this case, it means a celluloid combination of nineteenth-century Parsi plays with their song and dance numbers, Urdu poetry, Victorian melodrama, and folk theater with its stock cast of baddies, damsels in distress, strict fathers and enduring mothers.

Most of all, masala films are firmly rooted in Hindu epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Their narratives easily play out over several centuries or even millennia, featuring the family lives of dynasties both divine and mortal. In Southern India and parts of Southeast Asia, actors are revered like gods, with film stills or posters serving as altarpieces. Some traditional Indian dance performances can take all night retelling these stories, with villagers and performers enraptured until sunrise announces another day. They all know how the story is going to end, but they come for the artistry with which it is told.

This makes masala films an acquired taste for Westerners, who are used to seeing a ninety-minute feature about one protagonist chasing after his or her goal. Indian audiences would want to know what their parents are like, to whom they are married, and where their kids are. Seeing the protagonist deal with an overbearing bari ma (grandmother) or a corrupt cousin gives them crucial information about the protagonist's morals.

The film industry in Bombay is not fond of the moniker 'Bollywood,' even though they invented the word in the Eighties. In the nationalist Nineties it became a sign of weakness to suggest a connection with American blockbusters. Even the city itself was renamed Mumbai in a nationalist campaign, although many filmi people continue to call it by its old name. One politically correct alternative is 'Indian cinema.' That would leave no distinction between the musical blockbusters coming out of Bombay, films shot in any of India's twenty-one languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil or Telugu, and documentaries about social issues. The Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, whose world film classics spawned what Indians call 'parallel' (the equivalent of art-house) cinema, would fall in the same category as Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Hindi blockbuster Devdas.

The other suggested moniker, 'Hindi cinema,' is also a bit of misnomer, since that would suggest, for instance, that Parineeta--a film made by a Bengali director and based on a Bengali novel, but financed out of Mumbai--is basically Hindi. And strictly speaking Mumbai culture is Marathi, not Hindi. Some Tamil films are based on the masala formula, but would that make them Hindi, too? To confuse things further, non-Hindi cities like Kolkata (the modern spelling of Calcutta) and Lahore in Pakistan have already been dubbed Kollywood and Lollywood respectively. Politically correct film people call it 'Hindi cinema,' but the rest of the world calls it 'Bollywood.' The film business is one of the country's few industries where caste, religion or tribe truly does not matter, as long as you bring money or desired skills. In view of that mix, 'masala film' seems like a good compromise.

Reflections from Within the Industry

Last June, the Mumbai industry descended upon the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. The International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) organizes its annual awards ceremonies abroad to promote Indian cinema on an international stage. Actors and actresses revered by billions in Asia, Africa, and Arab countries walked around amidst the clueless locals, chased only by their arduous Dutch fans of South Asian descent.

One of Bollywood's most prominent lyricists, Javed Akhtar, explained the difference between his films and those of the Dutch film professionals filling the room: "European films tend to deal with one emotion, or one problem. You can see them as short stories; whereas, an Indian film is more like a novel. If you would make a film in India called It Happened One Night, people would feel cheated! They want larger-than-life stories. Indian sagas have to have every emotion in the book. In our first talkie from 1933 there were fifty songs! There was never any doubt that we wouldn't use songs. As a lyricist, I write to an existing tune and I try to solve a narrative problem in the content of the lyrics. But I'm always dependent on whether a story is conducive to writing a song, whether it has certain sensibilities."

Perhaps even more so than other cinemas, masala films reflect changes in India's society and politics. "You can analyze India from the films," said Akhtar. "Art records hopes, fears, pride, and humiliation. Behind the glamor and the dances you can see our contemporary aspirations. In the Fifties, there was idealism and hope in politics and cinema. Prosperity seemed just around the corner, but since there was a socialist climate, rich people were the bad guys. In the Seventies there was a breakdown of our institutions, martial law, the rise of vigilantes and the angry young man. The Eighties saw a dip in politics, music, films, and art. The industrialization of the Seventies had led to the rise of a middle class that was different from the landed gentry. They were the first generation to get educated on a massive scale."

During the rule of the Hindu BJP party from 1994 to 2004, masala films reached high levels of technical excellence, providing picture-perfect visuals and soundtracks--but with storylines and attitudes reflecting the party's conservative stance, emphasizing family values and religious patriotism.

That decade produced Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), still shown in the Maratha Mandir Theater in Bombay, and recently pronounced the longest running film in India. The film cemented the career of actor Shah Rukh Khan, now Bollywood's most powerful player. He plays a London-based student who meets a fellow Indian Londoner on a train in Switzerland. After dropping his ladies' man act, they must overcome her parents' objections to the pairing. Only by returning to her native Punjab with its yellow mustard fields, and embracing the ways of the old country, are they fully accepted.

The film was an instant hit because of its portrayal of hip young NRI's (non-resident Indians), who also flocked to see the film all over the world. For the first time, British and American audiences of Indian descent who saw their life-styles partly reflected in the film, turned out to be a force to be reckoned with. Actor Shah Rukh Khan, who previously played psychotic bad guys, broke through with his first role as a romantic hero with a naughty college-boy persona. The packaging was slick, the production values high, but the message was retrogressive: return to the motherland and its family values.

"Here's what turns my stomach," writes Indian journalist Jerry Pinto in Outlook India, a current-affairs weekly. "In all mainstream cinema ... the hero must stand for us, so that we can vicariously live out our fantasies, winning the pretty lady, beating up the goons, spritzing politicians with a machine-gun. Now what fantasy is it where the hero says he won't whisk off his heroine and marry her without his father-in-law's permission? Where is the anarchic potential of love that was always celebrated in Hindi films?"

The films Pinto refers to (Sujata, Bandhini, Pakeezah) were made in the Sixties, when violence started flaring up, and the early Seventies, when that violence led to martial law, and with it a subsequent loss of faith in institutions. Anarchy is a luxury few people can afford in real life. It is an ingredient of the dream factory. Viewers can revel in their heroes' rejection of rejection.

Indian Cinema Today

Today's India is experiencing a significant growth in the computer and services industries. With increasing numbers of city dwellers aspiring and reaching middle-class security, they are less interested in anarchy and more in stability. Women are joining the work force in ever-greater numbers. Thanks to cable TV and a newfound prosperity, Indian tastes are changing. The classic masala flick tried to cater to an all-Indian audience. By casting a broad narrative net of humor, melodrama, tears, and laughter--all sprinkled with multicolored confetti--producers wanted to catch both the older farmhand who saves up all week for a movie ticket and the young, wealthy urbanite.

Multiplexes charging high ticket prices have sprung up in cities and towns, accessible only to the upper-middle classes. Less well-off viewers make do with soap operas that are challenging taboos even more than feature films are. In response to the changing sensibilities of urban, middle-class audiences, the more adventurous producers are searching for something different. More film-school graduates are getting their first break in an industry where the big stars have typically passed on the baton to their children, regardless of their talent. These educated first-time directors are bringing new stories to Bombay, or new ways of telling old stories.

Some producers are placing their bets on new talent outside the usual recruiting pool of acting dynasties such as the Bachchans and Kapoors. As a result, there have been a few films that seem to be breaking away from the formula, whether it's in style, content, or production methods. Most of them--Black, My Brother Nikhil, Rang de Basanti, and Being Cyrus--have been shown in the U.S. through NRI-targeted distributors or art-house theaters like the ImaginAsian in New York.

"A lot of the young generation directors are students from film schools," explains Onir, director of My Brother Nikhil, who presented his film at the Asia Society in New York last June. Born in Nepal, he is a graduate of comparative literature at Kolkata Jadavpur University and trained as a filmmaker in Berlin. After the New York screening, he took his film to Germany, where he showed it at the annual 'Bollywood & Beyond' festival in Stuttgart. "They do not belong to the 'Bollywood dynasty,'" and hence the films are much more experimental. Since audiences are rejecting ninety percent of formula Bollywood films, filmmakers are looking at how to get audiences into the theaters with new ideas and treatments.

British filmmaker and writer Nasreen Munni Kabir has played a major role in popularizing the genre through U.K.'s Channel Four documentaries and through several books. She has just completed two documentaries about the actor Shah Rukh Khan, The Inner/Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan, released on DVD by Eros Entertainment last September. According to Kabir, audiences in India are ready for a change. It seems that the days of anarchic love are numbered. "The characters are allowed to be more human today in films," she says. "In the Fifties, which to me was Bollywood's best period, they were more human too, but they had a different kind of morality. Now they have to do with the complexities of living in a modern India. Audiences are less bound to social rules. They understand through their own living that life is a struggle. There is scope for more complexity. I think that comes from watching Indian TV soaps; some of them talk about the difficulties of living with a mother-in-law, and so on. All these taboo areas of family relations are now examined."

In 1996, Canadian director Deepa Mehta's Fire sparked riots in India because of the taboo subject matter of her film: the love between two women. Theaters were stormed in protest against the film's portrait of two lonely women finding solace in each other's arms. The producers of My Brother Nikhil, director Onir and main actor Sanjay Suri, weren't going to take the same risk. Their film deals with the reaction of a young man's family when they find out he has been infected with HIV.

Their main concern was not to focus on Nikhil's sexuality or even how he contracted the virus in the first place. Instead they focused on Nikhil's environment--his partner, family, friends, colleagues, and authorities. The subject matter might suggest arthouse drama, but My Brother Nikhil aims at Bollywood audiences, with a mainstream cast (top actress Juhi Chawla and veteran Victor Bannerjee), a successful soundtrack, and an innovative marketing campaign by major distributor Yash Raj Films, in which young Bollywood stars ask the public: "I care for Nikhil--do you?" The film is one of the few commercial productions to be financed independently.

"The film starts with a message saying it's not based on a true story," explains Suri. "We had to put it there to pass the censor; they wanted us to avoid any kind of controversy coming from anywhere. The law we mention in the film [isolating HIV positive citizens] is really true, and the story did happen. We put all our money in this--friends' money, insurance money, and savings. We could not afford any kind of controversy. We wanted the film to be released. We could have argued with the censor, but we couldn't afford any kind of delay."

The film is a modest success in India--having been received positively by the mainstream media. It continues to be screened, and is also shown at AIDS awareness events in smaller towns or remote regions. Director Onir says some people bring their families to see the film in order to out themselves.

But so far, the film has not been picked up by any of the Bollywood distributors in either the U.S. or the U.K., as NRI audiences are thought to be interested in nostalgic romances that reinforce their idea of the motherland they left behind--rather than in bold new productions that highlight changes in that same motherland. "It's a big problem for us," says Onir. "Mainstream Bollywood distributors in the U.S. or U.K. are not willing to take risks and invest in advertising and promoting this kind of film. Because overseas audiences supposedly don't want to see films like My Brother Nikhil, they don't want to fund them. I think the second-generation NRI audiences would be interested in seeing a film like ours, but they don't get an opportunity to do so. We need a little bit more support for changing India and changing Indian cinema from the usual singing and dancing around trees."

Some literary adaptations highlight the differences between classic Bollywood and filmmakers who are pushing against the boundaries. The blockbuster Devdas (2002) is based on a novel by the Calcutta author Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, whose literary classics from the early twentieth century inspired no less than forty screen adaptations. Devdas and his other works deal with weak Brahmin men whose upper caste stands in the way of happy marriages with their lower-caste childhood sweethearts. With a budget of $10 million, Devdas is the most expensive film ever made in India. A baroque fable with a distinctly unhappy ending, it features the world's best-known Bollywood actors, Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Ray (Bride and Prejudice).

Devdas is masala at its most glorious. It takes visual vibrancy and sweeping emotions to the max, not an easy accomplishment in a genre that is already ruled by the motto 'more is more.' The film has a highly polished look with sensually saturated colors, spellbinding choreography, and a memorable soundtrack. Partly cofinanced by French producers, it premiered at Cannes and made $5 million in North America alone.

Parineeta is another screen adaptation from a Chattopadhyay novel, but it is almost the polar opposite of Devdas. Its world premiere took place in Amsterdam during the 2005 IIFA Awards. Compared to Devdas, Parineeta is a study in restraint, apart from a hammed-up finale that feels tacked on. Overall, Parineeta is a refined piece of work by producer Vidhu Vinodh Chopra, who has built his career making high quality features (Mission Kashmir, Munnabhai MBBS). Parineeta went on to screen in the highly selective Forum section of the International Berlin Film Festival. First-time feature director Pradeep Sarkar, a Kolkata native who has worked in advertising, shifted the story to 1962, a time of social unrest. Sarkar focuses on the family's faded Bengali gentility, giving the women a mid-Sixties glamor similar to Wong Kar-wai's vamps from In the Mood for Love and 2046--reminders that during that decade, Asia embraced pop culture, just like the rest of the world.

After the premiere, Parineeta's main actor Saif Ali Khan spoke about making the film: "My mother [actress Sharmila Tagore and great-granddaughter of Nobel-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore] sent me a text message to say she is really proud of this film. She's never done that before. She's Bengali and they're quite touchy about their art. It's the first time I've worked with a lighting person who created so many shadows, as opposed to light."

Comedy actor Khan was an unusual casting choice for the tortured soul of Shekhar, who gets stuck running the family business instead of following his heart. He yearns for a music career and the orphan girl he grew up with, but social mores stand in his way. Although mainly a love story, the film shows a family holding on to better days while Kolkata is burning. The film's restraint makes it stand out from the usual masala fare. Producer Chopra's risk in casting Khan has paid off. "In Hindi cinema we are very melodramatic. It's all over the top. It's very rare to see an actor who holds his own in a classic story. In the climactic moment he looks at his father and just walks away; I really don't recall a Hindi actor who underplayed a role like that."

Underplaying has paid off for Saif Ali Khan, who is playing the role of Iago in an upcoming Indian screen version of Othello. In the past year, Khan has emerged as an actor of substance. After portraying yet another breezy playboy in Salaam Namaste (2005), he is surpassing his Parineeta performance in this year's surprise hit, Being Cyrus. Made by first-time director Homi Adajania and a handful of first-time producers, this drama, drenched in black humor, was first screened in the U.S. to a sold-out crowd at New York's South Asian Film Festival in December 2005. Three months later, the film was released worldwide by Eros International, a mainstream Bollywood distributor with an office in New Jersey. This is also India's first ever English-language film. Having middle-class Bombay characters speak English doesn't require a great stretch of the imagination. At the Parineeta press conference, Saif Ali Khan, who was educated in England, became slightly uncomfortable when Dutch journalists of Indian descent started firing questions in Hindi at him.

Khan plays Cyrus, a rootless drifter who ends up in a curious menage a trois with a sculptor, who has exchanged pottery for industrial-strength pot, and his gaudy wife, whose libido goes into overdrive the minute she sees Cyrus standing on their doorstep. Cyrus manages to survive the disastrous dynamics in this particular household, but when he travels to Bombay to deal with the rest of the sculptor's family, the plot takes a dark turn.

The sculptor's older brother is abusing their ancient father, hoping to speed up the old man's demise so he can inherit his Bombay building. Cyrus takes pity on the man and tries to help him, but ultimately, he pursues a plot of his own. Having grown up in foster homes and still bearing the visible scars of that experience, Cyrus's demons come to chase him in this Bombay episode. Director Adajania clearly enjoys visualizing those demons in the form of flashbacks, using sound effects and bold stylistic choices that are unusual for Bollywood.

Comic relief is provided by veteran actor Boman Irani, a friend of the filmmaker's father and undoubtedly one of the forces that gave the young director his first chance. His pomposity as the greedy older brother comes with a great deal of cursing in Parsi slang, which sent the audience in New York's ImaginAsian Theater howling with laughter. Since the film is not subtitled, non-Hindi speakers can only guess at the colorful content of Irani's curses.

By Western standards, this is a particularly well-made indie drama. By Bombay standards, however, it's a watershed moment. India has produced its fair share of world-class art-house cinema, but this film is special because it has been made in the Bollywood environment with big commercial stars, and it has been marketed through regular Bollywood channels. With a running time of ninety minutes, the film has no dance numbers or any other musical interludes, and the emotions are toned down, apart from the apparently hilarious Boman Irani. "If the film had been released five years ago, I would have said there's no market for it in India," said trade journalist Komal Nahta on the BBC radio show Film Cafe. "It's not the usual Hindi film. But now there are a growing number of people who like to see such films, which is why the film had a reasonable start in Bombay."

Like Hollywood, Bollywood is fond of hijacking material from successful films from all over the world, whether Hollywood, New York or Hong Kong. In Black (2005) director Sanjay Leela Bhansali magnified the painful suffering that was already present in his previous blockbuster Devdas. Black is a songless, danceless film that is based on the play Aatam Vinjhe Paankh, which was inspired by William Gibson's play about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker. One of Bhansali's previous films, Khamoshi, had dealt with the same problems of deaf-mute people with no system to make sense of the world around them. Sadly, Khamoshi flopped as it may have been ahead of its time in 1996.

In the last two years, revered veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan has reinvented himself from the angry young man to a patriarch with Hindu family values. In Black he plays against type as the drunk, washed-up teacher. He tries to bring light to the deaf-blind-mute Michelle, who is a scared, violent girl, lashing out at everything she doesn't know or understand. Actress Rani Mukherjee, who like many Indian actresses is often limited to playing the role of a girlfriend or wife, does an excellent job in portraying Michelle's fear of the world around her. With her teacher's help, Michelle ends up graduating from university and starts a clinic of her own.

Like Devdas, the set designs are larger than life--a theatrically empty mansion, long shadows and dark-blue hues. Filled with Christian imagery, the film's look is reminiscent of John Woo's Hong Kong films, Bullet in the Head (1990) and Hardboiled (1992), in which Woo punctuates gory violence with moodily lit churches and white doves. Bhansali successfully externalizes Michelle's panic, which she conquers, only to end up caring for her Alzheimer's-afflicted teacher. Director Bhansali has taken Bollywood's preference for hautes emotions, but has swung the pendulum in the direction of despair, away from the usual ecstatic happiness displayed in typical masala films. His portrayal of Michelle's panic is not merely psychological, the way it would be portrayed in Western realism, but is utterly cinematic--conveyed through set design, costumes and lighting. The film was more successful overseas than in India. Despite rave reviews and numerous awards, some rural audiences may have resisted this departure from the Bollywood dream factory.

But Hollywood is paying attention. Bhansali is the first Indian director to have signed a production deal with a Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment, to make a film in his own country and on his own terms. His Saawariya is not meant to be a potential crossover hit, but a full-blown Hindi production.

As Bhansali's work suggests, on a creative front, things are definitely changing on and off the soundstages of major studios. With the social democratic Congress Party having taken over the reign from the conservative BJP party, staunchly patriotic and conservative themes may be a thing of the past. All of the aforementioned films are cowritten by their directors and/or producers respectively, so there seems to be room for directors' developing their own voice. It may be too early, however, to call it a New Wave, and historically, there have always been innovative directors within the industry.

"It's new and it's not new," says Nasreen Munni Kabir from her London office. "Black and Parineeta are remakes. There is a tendency to look back. But younger filmmakers are looking for different subjects and their treatment of them is new. They're moving away from stereotypes, which is the most unusual thing. There is no villain, or a heroine; the characterizations are changing. Every generation has to find its own language, and there's a very healthy atmosphere. I expect a lot of movement in Bollywood. Every new film is redefining the genre. For me, the most interesting of recent films is Munnabhai because it continues the tradition of the working-class hero. His encounters with the middle classes are very funny." The films Kabir cites are shorter (around two hours), contain less song and dance (although music remains a crucial component), and tap into the rich veins of psychological drama or social themes--sometimes subtly and sometimes not--than is usual for Bollywood productions.

Typically, length and form have prevented Bollywood from making a big splash in the West, as other Asian genres have done. And, while Bollywood will never become 'parallel' cinema--whose main auteurs Satyajit Ray, Mani Kaul, and Buddhadev Dasgupta are already revered in the West by festival programmers, critics, and scholars alike--the question remains as to whether it can open the door for new young filmmakers and help them find new audiences, both in India and abroad.

This would be possible only if the industry--production, marketing, and distribution--is able to see the potential. "Producers need to find the guts to fund films that are not 'projects,' a term used in Bollywood to refer to mainstream films with big casts composed of mainstream actors," comments Onir from Germany, where he is presenting My Brother Nikhil in the country's 'Beyond Bollywood' festival in Stuttgart. "It has to come from a creative need to risk and invest in something new."

Gabriele Ammerman is a flee-lance TV producer from Germany who traveled to Amsterdam for the IIFA awards, hoping to make some Bollywood connections. After two major German channels, ARTE and RTL2, started showing Bollywood films last year, she has seen a surging interest in the genre, particularly among Germany's Turkish population and German teenagers who consider Bollywood hip, thanks to the emergence of bhangra music and Bollywood club themes. Other Germans seem to appreciate the dream world no longer offered by Hollywood or the European cinema.

"Films like Veer-Zaara or Main Hoon Na may have a modern message thrown in, like a little feminism or the hope for peace between India and Pakistan, but still the masala recipe is the same as it was ten or twenty years ago," Ammerman points out. "Black and Parineeta show how Bollywood filmmakers are experimenting with different stories, settings and style. Right now they are not what Bollywood is known for here. Thanks to RTL2, Bhansali is by far the most popular Bollywood star in Germany. The 'hardcore' Bollywood lovers might be disappointed by a different kind of Hindi films; whereas, other people won't watch the films if they think they'll be seeing the usual Bollywood flick with just too much schmaltz for their taste."

A few adventurous producers and filmmakers seem to be breathing new life into Bollywood by making their own voices heard rather than sticking to the rules. But for real change to take effect, the industry needs to support them in terms of distribution, marketing, and exhibition. Making Bollywood a success in the West would require the London and New York-based Indian distributors to market to non-NRIs. "Unless international distributors pick up films for a wider audience, it will always remain for Indian audiences only," says Kabir. "I went to see Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, which is distributed by Columbia Tri-Star, and I can see why. It's brilliantly made, very entertaining, and you don't need to know the whole of Cantonese culture to follow the narrative. Indian films are definitely more complex in that way."

Gabriele Ammerman thinks classic Bollywood stands a better chance in Germany than the newer, more adventurous films. "To get a wider German audience, the films would need to get some PR first, then a good translation or a dubbing. All this will cost money, and I can't see anyone risking 200,000 Euros to promote an unusual Hindi film here, without any guarantee of getting the money back. Only if the Indian film producers invest in marketing and media relations, will their films have a chance on the Western market."

Lagaan proved that Western audiences were ready for a dose of Indian history, dance numbers and even an hour-long cricket match. Producer/actor Aamir Khan has recently followed this up with two other historically inspired roles as a rebel against British rule. He played a mutineer in last year's The Rising, which collapsed under the weight of its historic pretensions, leaving little room for character development and emotional plausibility.

He played a similar role in this year's highly successful Rang de Basanti, which shows that an audience exists for edgy drama with a political message. Khan plays an uber-slacker and the ringleader of a group of fun-loving students who prefer motor bikes and techno raves to attending classes. When a young British filmmaker wants them to play some of India's first freedom fighters in her no-budget indie film, they slowly conquer their socio-political apathy. A personal tragedy fans the flames of their burgeoning indignation, and they take matters in their own hands. As this film and the Nineties hit DDLJ attests, young people in India and abroad wish to recognize themselves on screen, in films that take their lifestyle and concerns seriously.

Although it has a few highly infectious and celebratory dance numbers, Rang de Basanti is not about extended families and big weddings. The marketing of this film has revolved around blogs and message boards, where star Aamir Khan chatted with fans, while the traditional media had to sit back and wait their turn for an interview slot. Some eager film pundits have already proclaimed Rang de Basanti 'the Black of 2006,' but this was before Being Cyrus came out.

"Rang de Basanti broke our attendance records," says ImaginAsian theater programmer Dylan Marchetti. "We sold 4000 tickets in three weeks and after a couple of screenings, there must have been some word-of-mouth buzz, because we started to see an increase in non-Indian visitors. It crossed over because it had an original story, not copied from Hollywood, plus a great soundtrack and a good cast."

It's true that Rang de Basanti is closer to Bollywood with its emotional overdrive and colorful dance scenes. But any film about social issues had better pay extra attention to the emotional arc of its characters, and Being Cyrus with its dysfunctional individuals does a better job of keeping its viewers engaged, both emotionally and visually.

India is a young country and is still defining itself. Should it give in to the lure of growing consumerism and other Western aspirations? Should it hold on to its homegrown values? But how to do that without regressing into conservative sloganeering? The Hindu conservatives may have retreated temporarily, but pride in the country's independence is never far away.

Perhaps it's better not to look for this year's Black, but to keep looking for the new talents who are slowly fighting their way through the Bollywood machine to get their vision on the big screen. After all, their films reflect a country that is expected to play a big role on the world stage of the new century.