Superboys of Malegaon: A crowdpleaser about DIY cinema, Desi style
By Liam Lacey
“We've gotta have a great show, with a million laughs... and colour... and a lot of lights to make it sparkle!”
Thus spake Judy Garland in 1939’s Babes in Arms, the mother of the trope about a gang of misfits who put on a hit entertainment in defiance of the naysayers. Firmly in that tradition, Superboys of Malegaon tells a local story of an intimate Indian filmmaking collective, which resonates with a deeper theme about finding one’s place in the world through cinema.
After a well received debut at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, followed by screenings at London’s BFI Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Superboys of Malegaon, is poised to cross over to a large international audience.
The setting is the city of Malegaon, a textile manufacturing center about 280 kms northeast of Mumbai, the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra
On weekend nights, the local workers of Malegaon like to forget their looms and escape to the cinema. In this movie-mad town, a sometime wedding photographer Nasir Sheikh and his friends began creating their own video movies, spoofing Bollywood and Hollywood hits.
The phenomenon caught the attention of a Singapore television crew in 2008, who, in 2012, released the surprisingly successful 65-minute theatrical film, Supermen of Malegaon. (You can watch it on YouTube here) .
Now their story has been made into a dramatic feature, directed by Reema Kagti, written by Varun Grover and starring Adarsh Gourav (Netfix’s The White Tiger).
Kagti’s film, set from 1997 to 2010, begins with a long montage sequence of each of the future filmmakers - a video store clerk, a journalist, a teacher, a factory worker and a fruit seller - going about their workday lives in the small Muslim-majority city. Later in the day, when there are long queues outside the local commercial theatre, there are few takers for Nasir’s screenings of old Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films at his older brother’s video business.
On his brother’s orders, Nasir, accompanied by his mill worker friend and aspiring actor, Shafique (Shashank Arora), acquires more commercial VHS tapes. After picking up the tapes, Nasir begins using a pair of VHS machines to splice together silent Hollywood comedies, Jackie Chan movies and Bollywood favourites in a greatest-scenes mishmash.
The collages are popular among his friends, until he’s shut down by the local police for film pirating. The setback pushes Nasir to a new level of creativity: Why not shoot his own video movies? He reaches out to his friends, including local journalist and aspiring screenwriter Farogh (Vinet Singh) and mill worker, Shafique (Shashank Arora) Their first film is a comic and local take on one of India’s historically biggest hits, the 1975 “curry Western” Sholay.
The result is a genuine local hit, followed by a string of parody videos. But the minor box office success soon leads to a behind-the-scenes schism. Screenwriter Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh), who sees himself as a serious writer, argues that it’s time to move beyond spoofs, and he’s offended with Nasir’s crude use of product placement (a local match manufacturer) in his films.
After an angry quarrel, in which Nasir suggests that Farogh go to Mumbai if he thinks he’s so hot, the writer heads to the big city, His belief that the real Bollywood industry will be more artistically satisfying is soon dashed.
The personal schism also alienates Nasir from his old friends and the fledgling “Mollywood” industry appears to have crested. Years pass. By 2010, the old video shop is repurposed as a restaurant. But when the aspiring actor Shafique gets a cancer diagnosis, the team finds a reason to come together again.
A film to honor Shafique (who loves the idea of flying) in a Superman parody, forces the team to up their movie game, employing the new-fangled technique of green-screen action and wire-flying.
Somewhat true to its DIY roots, Superboys feels somewhat ragged, particularly in scenes that follow a series of Nasir and Shafique’s successful and unsuccessful relationships with women, which seem to be there to fill a romance quota rather than advance the story.
But, as well as celebrating how collaboration and competition fuel any art movement, Superboys is a salute to filmmaking that’s personal and local, even if it does appear on screens around the world.
Superboys of Malegaon. Directed by Reema Kagti. Written by Varun Grover. Starring Adarsh Gouda’s, Vinet Kumar Singh, Shashank Arora. The film appears in theatres across Canada on Feb. 28.