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Entertainment
The parody pays off
"CINTA BOLLYWOOD" (which in Malay means "I Love Bollywood"), is a 10-episode television serial, now being telecast in Singapore's Media Corp's Malay channel, Suriya. It has secured the highest ratings for a drama serial in the channel's history.
Directed by Chennai based filmmaker Chetan Shah, and produced by Kutty Padmini and Prabhu Nepal's Vaishnavi Enterprises, the theme of "Cinta Bollywood" is the Malaysian people's love for Hindi cinema. At one level it is a love triangle, the Hindi film kind, and hence a parody and at another it explores the influence Bollywood has on the people there.
Of director Chetan's earlier television ventures for Vaishnavi Enterprises, "Bhool Na Jaana" and "Sunghursh", the latter was shot partly in Singapore and Bangkok, but the production team was entirely from India. For "Cinta Bollywood", the camera crew was from India, while the rest of the production team had local technicians.
Though the dialogue is in Malay and the actors are from Singapore itself, Chetan hardly faced any problem of communication because all of them could converse in English. And Chetan's way of working also made things easy. The director and the cast had done their homework so meticulously that things fell in place comfortably on location. Chetan worked with an English translation of the script and his first assistant director helped him keep track of the Malay script, as the scenes were being shot.
Shooting live sound in Singapore was another challenge because of the ever-increasing noise all around.
Doing a song and dance sequence in typical filmi style was a funny experience for the director and the actors — none of them had done such scenes before.
Now Indonesian TV wants the producers to make "Cinta Bollywood" in the local language, Bhasa.
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