In 2008, Indian filmmaker Faiza Khan released Supermen of Malegaon, a swift, charming documentary that captured the filmmaking prowess of Nasir Sheikh and his collaborators. Like Chris Smith’s sublime American Movie, Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal’s Nollywood Babylon, or Cathryne Czubek’s look at Wakaliwood in Once Upon a Time in Uganda, Khan’s film provides a look at a subculture of film fanatics as they embody the spirit of truly independent filmmaking by any means necessary.
This ersatz filmmaking scene in Malegaon, a relatively small city laying more than 300 km to the north east of the bustling Bollywood centre of Mumbai, is also the subject of Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon, set to have its world premiere at TIFF 2024. With this new film giving an explicit nod to the documentary with a closing title card, it was a perfect opportunity to see now the documentary shaped this new telling. While the dramatic feature expands the scope, drawing upon the highs and lows of the partnership of these film fanatics beyond what was captured previously and coming in from a completely different direction, it’s also clear that there’s plenty that both film projects have in common.
We spoke to Kagti and one of the film’s main producers, Zoya Akhtar, prior to their arrival in Toronto about their relationship to the documentary that brought this story to their attention, the divide between fiction and non-fiction storytelling, and what it was like to capture the unique features of this particular community.
POV: Jason Gorber
ZA: Zoya Akhtar
RK: Reema Kagti
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: How challenging is it to tell an effective story with the obligations of the truth set out in the documentary while still creating your own version of events?
RK: Very challenging! The purview of the film is a lot wider than what’s seen in the documentary where they focussed on the making of the one project. Our writer, Varun Grover, has tried to remain as true to the story as possible. As we say in India, one is obligated to add a little bit of masala and Tabasco to spice things up. While this is a fictional take on a person’s life, I think his script stayed as close to the truth as possible. When we’ve strayed, we have kept to the spirit of things, as opposed to completely making things up.
POV: Isn’t it sometimes easier to simply start from scratch, and not be locked into the vagaries of actuality?
RK: Yes. But this story was just so special, the truth is so special, that there was no conflict in that sense. We wanted this story.
POV: Both your film and the documentary detail a specific kind of cinematic fanaticism. Can you talk about your own connection to moviegoing?
RK: One of the big connections between the two of us, and our subjects as well, is that we are all huge film buffs. The fact that Nasir and his gang of friends were so fanatical was completely on point and very easy to relate to as a filmmaker myself.
ZA: We in India are in a country where cinema is adored. We are a cinema-going nation. We love our movies, we love our stars. When we talk about smaller places like Malegaon, they didn’t really have many theatres. So if that meant piracy, then that meant piracy. But, as Indians, we will find a way to watch the films. That’s why these little video parlours and these rooms sprang forth. Today, I’m a filmmaker, but if there are people in a place where they don’t have access to watching my film on a screen, I’m ok if they pirate it and watch it. As long as they watch it!
POV: Is there anything specific about the uniqueness of watching films in India?
ZA: In India, there are certain theatres we have that we call single screens, designating that it’s not a multiplex theatre, and therefore it’s cheaper. Watching films there is raucous, like being in a rock concert. There’s an energy that comes alive with certain actors, and the audience screams every time they come on to screen. People will be throwing money, they’ll dance with the songs, so there is a whole experience. It’s really like being in a Taylor Swift concert if you go watch a Salman Khan movie. Besides that, I remember being a kid, but we also used to buy what we called “black tickets.” People would buy tickets ahead of time, and then they would sell them at a kind of black market before the show.
POV: Reema, can you think of the first movie that you saw, that you thought, “This is what I want to do. This is what I want to dedicate my life to?”
RK: Well, that came pretty late in life. I think I was about 15 or 16, and it was a film by Mira Nair called Salaam Bombay! [1988]
ZA: That film triggered both of us, I think. While we both grew up in separate cities, we both grew up watching films from all over the world. When you’re a young kid, you love everything. And then when you hit your teens, you start being a bit more discerning. We hit our teens in the 1980s, and during that period, Indian Hindi cinema, our cinema that we grew up with, was terrible. That decade was especially bad. Then along comes Salaam Bombay!, which suddenly shows us that one can do whatever one wants. We could make a film in India and it could be authentic, and it can be truthful, and it can be entertaining, and it can be potent. It could be all of those things. I think that movie deeply affected many people in my generation, especially the urban kids who were growing up and were not really connecting with the cinema of that period.
RK: I didn’t even consider being a filmmaker before that film. I was just a film buff. But watching Mira’s film, by the time the credits were rolling, I was like, I should be doing this.
POV: Let’s talk about Faiza’s documentary, specifically. Narratively, your film borrows a lot, of course, I’m wondering whether there are conscious thematic connections. Did you re-watch it in preparation? Or was it best to set it aside while you were working on your own vision?
RK: We’ve both seen seen Faiza’s documentary, but we took a very different approach to building Nasir’s entire story. As I mentioned, Varun Grover, the writer of our film, went to Malegaon and spent months there with Nasir and the people who are featured in the documentary. He collected their stories firsthand and started from scratch to develop this project.
POV: That’s how the script came about, but are there specific shots or specific elements that you looked to the documentary to replicate?
RK: No. In that sense, I didn’t borrow anything specifically. There are shared themes, obviously, as they are part of Nasir’s life. So of course there is that overlap. But we didn’t go out of our way and recreate anything in the documentary.
POV: Were the actors given the documentary as a form of research? Were they encouraged or discouraged from watching it?
RK:, I didn’t discourage them at all, and in fact, most of them had already seen it. The documentary was beloved when it came out, and did the full circuit. A lot of people have seen it, especially those in the film industry.
ZA: Faiza’s is a very loved documentary and a very loved film. It’s also been around since 2008, for years now. It’s such a super charming film, and it led me to meeting Nasir at a film festival at that time. They were there with the documentary, and I was there with another film of mine. My father is a screenwriter, and Nasir has actually remade some of my father’s films.
RK: Spun off, not remade.
ZA: [Laughs.] Spun off! Anyway, Nasir came and started talking to me and said that I’ve ripped off all of your father’s work, in the most innocent manner. He started telling me about his life, and I realized there’s a lot more than just in the documentary. We kept in touch, and eventually he let me know that he wanted to make a feature film of his life. So, a dozen or so years later, we got our writer in and he started interviewing them, discovering a whole world there in Malegaon. The documentary shows how the Superman movie got made, but who are these filmmakers? Where do they come from? What is behind their love of film? It’s such a larger-than-life dream for them, and our movie is able to capture this journey in a different way.
POV: Finally, there’s something fascinating that both you two, as well as Faiza with her documentary, are women capturing the truth of this community of filmmakers that, given the conservative community they emerged from, exclusively male. It’s an interesting, almost paradoxical thing when one reflects upon this.
RK: The reason they are almost all men in the story is because that is what was true, and that is the social and cultural backdrop that we were dealing with. On the other hand, I didn’t feel like such an outsider. I grew up partly in a small town, so that’s in my DNA. I can understand places like this, so navigating all this didn’t seem like a challenge.
ZA: We were out there as filmmakers, we were known as filmmakers, so it wasn’t alien. When Nasir approached me to tell his life story, he knew he was coming to a filmmaker, he had seen our work, and he knew we meant business.
POV: India is this incredibly complicated and yet incredibly beautiful. I’m going to once again use your word, “masala” – you have Hindi versus the Muslim and other cultures, you have gender dynamics, political dynamics, social dynamics, caste dynamics—all of these things at play. Were there barriers or opportunities navigating all this that surprised you?
RK: That’s a difficult question. Varun did a lot of important groundwork, so coming in on the basis of him, and the world that he had set up, I found it pretty accessible. When I myself finally spent time with Nasir, I found certain parallels as a filmmaker to filmmaker. So my approach I think was very personal. And even though it is was very rag tag bunch of filmmakers, art is art. And that’s the case whether I’m functioning out of Bollywood, or he’s functioning out of Malegaon.
ZA: This is the beauty of art, and how it breaks those barriers you were articulating. You are absolutely right in pointing it out, because there are big divides. There is a cultural divide, there is an economic divide, there is just everything. That’s the beauty of art, is that it doesn’t matter, because you relate straight from the heart. It’s all about a mutual respect.
