'The Bollywood Project': An unseen, unreleased documentary
The Bollywood Project from Adam Dow on Vimeo.
While a host of self-referential Bollywood feature films have been made on the inner workings of the Mumbai Hindi film industry, it's incredible that no one has attempted a definitive documentary film yet.
Actually, that's not entirely true. It's been filmed. You just haven't seen it yet.
For the last four years, Adam Dow and Ruchika Muchhala (co-producers and co-directors) have been following and filming four people behind the scenes, literally, for a documentary tentatively titled "The Bollywood Project."
In the film, Harry is a foreigner who stumbled into a career as a Bollywood actor after being spotted and scouted as a tourist in Colaba.
The second character, Premji, is a powerful but doubtful union leader who has taken on the cause of the hundreds of laborers employed on Bollywood film sets.
The third story centers around Ojas, a transgender make-up artist to whom celebrity Bollywood divas owe their sex symbol status.
And lastly, there is Pooja, a small-town girl who has come to the big city to dance in films, who is transformed into an all-out sexy "item number" dancer.
As young and independent filmmakers new to both the industry and the city, Dow and Muchhala's fresh curiosity leads them far into the world of working artists within the film industry.
"We're talking about workers whose physical labor is required on sets, creative artists who are responsible for the look of top celebrities, and performers who are thrown in amongst dozens of others in a song-and-dance number," said Muchhala.
"The film is intended as a 70-minute documentary, exposing the reality of such artists and workers rarely acknowledged in this film industry.
