Bollywood Eyes Germany for Newest Audiences

The Stuttgart fair, which ended Sunday night, is where Indian filmmakers come to conquer Europe and the United States, both slow to succumb to the sub-continent's entertaining epics.

"The festival is getting bigger and bigger," Indian director and prolific film music composer Naresh Sharma told the AFP news agency. "People are really interested in Indian film."

This year, the event drew 7,500 visitors, a thousand more than in 2005, but below the 10,000 expected.

The audience is a mixture of devotees who avidly follow the careers of their favorite stars such as actress Aishwarya Rai, and industry players who come to look at the latest offerings from the world's second biggest cinema industry after Hollywood.

Bollywood's two European camps

"On the one hand you have those who know the names of all the Indian actors, and on the other hand those who want to keep up do date with Bollywood," program director Wiebke Reiss said.

The German festival program did its best to cater to both groups.

In four days, some 100 films were shown, ranging from the next big features and a large number of documentaries to short horror films and a retrospective of the works of Raj Kapoor, an Indian cinema idol of the 1950s.

Women came dressed in flowing silk saris and traditional jewelery as thousands of filmgoers sampled the spicy Punjabi and Gujurati cuisine on offer at a bazaar set up for the festival.

Goal is to find new German viewers

But Weiss said the idea was also to convert those who believed that Indian cinema had little more to offer than curry westerns or kitschy dramas, often up to three hours long, where love plays the lead role and characters regularly burst into song and dance.

These films -- big on sentiment but coy about sex -- have found a following well beyond India, notably in the Arab world where they pose far fewer problems for the censors than standard Hollywood fare.

German television channels have warmed up to the charm of Indian cinema, with the cable channel RTL II snapping up a number of titles. But the country's cinemas are another story. At the moment there are about 15 features showing and 30 for rent at video stores.

Language makes finding new audiences difficult

"In order to sell Indian works in Germany, the films have to be dubbed, and this is very expensive," Reiss said. "We still need to make European distributors aware of Indian films and convince them that these works can win the hearts of the public here."

She singled out "Mixed Doubles" by director Rajat Kapoor as a film with a universal theme that could do well in Germany. It deals with the difficulty of keeping the passion alive after 10 years of marriage.

The organizers plan to keep expanding the festival. Stuttgart and Mumbai (Bombay) are twin cities and 2008 will mark the 40th anniversary of this link.