By Filip Noubel
There is little doubt the Covid-19 pandemic has benefitted global streaming platforms as the lockdown imposed in most countries has shut down cinemas, and forced people to stay at home and create their own entertainment programs. One of the most successful ones, Netflix, gained a record 37 new million viewers in 2020, and is not only broadcasting but also producing its own series, movies and documentaries.
But while Netflix, like its competitors HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and others, is enjoying a global expansion in terms of viewers, for most of its history, it remained Western-centered and predominantly in English. Yet a shift emerged and today the platform, as well as others, offer a wide range of content in non-English languages, produced or directed outside the Western world.
One region that has witnessed a growing and much more nuanced representation is South Asia. And while Netflix continues to produce and stream Western stereotypes of South Asia such as the action movie “Extraction”, it has also opened to a number of movies that are also different from the typical Bollywood industry and allow for an unprecedented diversity of languages, narratives, and genres.
To understand this trend, Global Voices talked to Shumona Sinha, a Bengali-French author, who gained international recognition through her awarded novel “Assommons les pauvres !” [Knock down the poors!]. Sinha, as many citizens affected by a strict lockdown in her home in France, is able to reconnect to her youth in Bengal via new Indian series and films that she perceives as a much welcome change in film production from the subcontinent. As she admits, as a person who has no TV set in her home, she has indeed spent much more time on Netflix than before the pandemic started, and explains the difference with what is offered on French TV:
Asked about her favorite South Asian show on the streaming platform, she explains:
As can be seen in the trailer of Taj Mahal 1989, the series plays up a vintage feel:
But beyond the sheer nostalgia, Sinha points out that there is a new generation of Indian movies and series, that she attributes in part to three key names: the producer Anurag Kashyap, who also created Netflix’s first India series, an adaptation to Vikram Chandra’s novel “Sacred Games”, and incidentally started as an actor in Safdar Hashmi’s cast. She also recommends Vishal Bhardwaj, another film producer who will act as a the leading producer for the Netflix series “Midnight’s Children”, adapted from Salman Rushdie’s novel.
According to Sinha, this Indian New Wave cinema is a real alternative to the Bollywood narratives:
The typical Bollywood storytelling, Sinha explains, is traditionally built on a clearly marked opposition between good and evil, and includes romantic love stories filmed in beautiful sceneries, in India and well as in other countries, and includes songs and dances that appear at regular intervals. This kind of movie is best epitomized by cult actor Amitabh Bachchan who has dominated Bollywood since the 1970s.
But regardless of the differences between Bollywood and art cinema style, what is clear for Netflix is that India has become a growing source of content, and a market in full expansion: it has just announced 41 new Indian titles for 2021.
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This post was previously published on Global Voices and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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