Acclaimed Indian director and writer Reema Kagti compares her latest movie, the heartwarming Superboys of Malegaon, to an onion.
“I mean it's my favourite vegetable,” she jokes, before adding that the drama, which was inspired by a true story, is a film “you can just keep peeling”.
“It has all these layers,” she tells The National. “And I think that is the genius of [writer] Varun Grover, who gave us such a multilayered script. He manages to say such big, heavy things in the lightest of ways – and he's beautifully written it into the progression of the film in a very, very organic way.”
Set in Malegaon, a west Indian city about a five-hour drive from Mumbai, the drama follows a group of friends who, despite limited resources, manage to launch their own mini film industry. While it's broadly an ode to cinema, it's also a film about friendship, community and the power of dreams.
“There's also a very subtle layer of us asking what is art? And who decides what it is, and who creates it, and who should be the doorkeepers of it,” says Kagti.
Set in the '90s, the film centres on the true story of Shaikh Nasir, whose life rights Kagti and her producing partner, the acclaimed director Zoya Akhtar, bought after they saw him being featured in the acclaimed documentary Supermen of Malegaon, released in 2008. The film version delves deeper into Nasir's story – a movie buff and video parlour owner who stumbles into filmmaking in one of the most outrageous ways possible.
“He started making these absolutely low-budget spoofs of Bollywood movies. He took people from his community and he put issues faced by his community into the film, and that really spoke to people,” Kagti explains. “A lot of these films started mushrooming to the point where he inadvertently gave rise to an entire alternative video film industry, like a complete parallel universe.
“And mind you, they were not rich people. They had really very little to create with. But they used all they had. They used their imagination. They did something called jugaad, which is a very Indian thing of making an inch, going a mile and doing what you can with the resources you have.”
Adarsh Gourav, who won a Bafta Best Actor nomination for his role in the 2021 film The White Tiger, plays Nasir in Superboys of Malegaon. He says he immersed himself in the role by moving to Malegaon and shadowing Nasir for weeks.
“He's a true visionary and I wanted to really capture the essence of this human being. So I lived next to him and basically followed him around everywhere. We had lots of meals together, I met his parents, family and friends,” he says.
“We even ended up making a film together and I got to see Nasir direct again after many years. He had taken a break from filmmaking, and that experience was also really helpful because we got the opportunity to go beyond the script and just activate our imaginations about how these people would behave, not just in situations that were already provided to us, but also in hypothetical scenarios.”
Actor Shashank Arora, known for his roles in the acclaimed film Titli, and the hit series Made in Heaven, says playing a real-life character was a challenge and an advantage, notably because Shafique, on whom his character is based, died of lung cancer a few years ago.
A textile mill worker, Shafique – in real life and in the film – got to briefly live his cinematic fantasy through his friend's dreams.
“I had a tighter perimeter to work with, but then it's almost spiritual in a way, because you're trying to give colour to this person that existed,” says Arora. “There's the voice, the way he sat and the way he spoke, but there were also of lot of things which were up to my imagination depending on what my writer and director wanted. So it's a mixture of all these things.”
Arora, like the rest of the cast, had to also learn the accent and diction that's uniquely Malegaon.
For his co-star Vineet Kumar Singh, one of the biggest challenges was to look and act as young as the rest of his cast members. “Reema gave me this beautiful opportunity but put me in between all these boys in their twenties,” he laughs.
Singh, who is 46, adds that he enjoyed playing writer Faroque, as he could draw from his own life experience, having written the acclaimed 2017 film Mukkabaaz.
Superboys of Malegaon has already earned wide praise during its festival run, having screened at the Toronto International Film Festival; the BFI London Film Festival; Palm Springs International Film Festival; and Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah.
Producer Akhtar hopes audiences will connect with Nasir's story and emotional core of the film just like they did at the festivals.
“When I met him, what struck me was his absolute love for film,” says Akhtar, known for directing films such as Gully Boy and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. “It was that escapism that this little town needed, because they're all cinema crazy, and it was how they decided to not wait for an opportunity in the big city.
“He wanted to be a filmmaker and was going to be a filmmaker. No one's going to tell him he wasn't. And that personal story, to me, is the beauty of this film. That's what's inspiring.”
Superboys of Malegaon will be in cinemas from Friday
