When Slumdog Millionaire wowed audiences having cost a mere £15 million to make, the film industry's savants foresaw a new era of super-frugal, post-credit crunch cinema.
They did not know the half of it. The latest darling of the festival circuit is a dirt-poor director who learned his trade shooting wedding videos in a backwater Indian town. His latest movie was made for just 0.01 per cent of the budget of Danny Boyle's movie.
When Shaikh Nasir, 33, a shopkeeper with a unshakable passion for cinema, embarked on his first feature film in the industrial hub of Malegaon in 2000, his measly 50,000 rupee (£650) budget meant a bullock cart had to serve as a camera crane and neighborhood tradesmen were roped in to star.
Even the plot was second hand. The film was a spoof remake of Sholay, a hit 1970s Bollywood action adventure — even if Mr Nasir's villain's had to forgo the horses ridden by the original's bandits, to travel by bicycle instead.
The homage, with its Python-esque eye for the ridiculous, delighted local audiences and won the director a cult following, but its DIY appeal never extended beyond the subcontinent.
Now, six super-low-budget films later, it appears that Mr Nasir is finally on the cusp of breaking onto the world stage. His latest project, Malegaon ka Superman (Superman of Malegaon), made for a relatively lavish 100,000 rupees, is winning international acclaim.
Something of Mr Nasir's agreeably ramshackle — if slightly loopy — style is gleaned when he recounts his influences. "I learnt my craft from the English classics," he told The Times. "James Bond, Jackie Chan, Charlie Chaplin, Commando, Rambo." Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that while Malegaon's Superman dons the red and blue of his Hollywood namesake, there the similarity ends.
Mr Nasir's hero is played by Shaikh Shafique, a skinny factory worker who was paid about £1.30 a day in what was his first acting role.
Superman's lycra outfit hangs from his scrawny frame. He wears flip flops over his baggy blue leggings, threads hang from his billowing shorts, and his asthma means he is not always up to fighting his nemesis, a local tobacco baron.
This may not sound like the type of fare worthy of winning gongs, but a documentary, called Supermen of Malegaon, which records the making of the feature film has clinched awards at film festivals in Los Angeles, Prague, Pakistan and Italy.
When Malegaon ka Superman was shown at a festival in Goa this week, international buyers jostled to snap up the rights. Consequently, a worldwide cinema release is — astonishingly — on the cards.
Such a move would put Malegaon, a gritty industrial town previously best known for ugly inter-religious violence, on the world cinema map — a status it surely deserves given the dedication of its hard-pressed film makers.
The region, about 180 miles northeast of Mumbai, is famous in India as the site of a bizarre parallel movie universe. Home-produced spoofs of Bollywood blockbusters made by a handful of budding amateur directors are more popular in Malegaon than the originals they parody.
The appeal of the spoofs, which are shown on VHS tape in local "mini theatres", owes much to the incorporation of local idioms and the escape they offer audiuences from the monotony of 14-hour shifts in local factories, Mr Nasir says. There is also the delight to be had in spotting the neighborhood postman hamming it up as, say, an evil henchman.
The Superman film marks the first time Mr Nasir has sought inspiration from Hollywood, but it remains true to his cottage industry ethos. It may have the biggest budget yet and be the first to be edited on computer. But the production process still rests on improvisation.
Superman is only able to achieve the illusion of flight, for instance, because he is held up horizontally above the heads of three of the crew or rolled along on a plank of wood placed on top of a bicycle.
Now, with Superman proving a triumph, Mr Nasir's fans want to know what source material he will tackle next?
"Malegaon ka Dinosaur" — a remake of Jurassic Park — and "Malegaon ka Rambo" have been mooted as "dream projects". However, a remake of another superhero franchise seems most likely: "Malegaon ka Spiderman". Unless, presumably, Hollywood's lawyers consider that an homage too far.
Low-budget blockbusters
• The low-budget zombie film Colin, which featured at Cannes festival this year, was made for £45. Marc Price, the director, said that the budget was spent on “a crowbar and some tapes”
• Robert Rodriguez raised almost $7,000 to make El Mariachi, his first feature film, by taking part in clinical drug trials. He went on to make blockbusters such as Sin City
• Oren Peli’s film Paranormal Activity cost between $10,000 and $15,000 to make and grossed more than $106 million
Sources: Theauteurs.com; Times database
From The Times (Times online December 5, 2009)
