Merchants show only part of Bollywood breakthrough

East Asia did it with Jackie Chan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - is it Bollywood's turn to add some serious garam masala to the global cultural melting pot?

It has always been a substantial dish on its own - according to Time magazine, the Indian industry produces about 1000 films a year for a worldwide audience of 3.6 billion, compared with Hollywood's 740 films for 2.6 billion viewers - but until recently, 99.9 per cent of its connoisseurs have been of Indian extraction.

In New Zealand, dairies and spice shops have stocked Hindi and Telugu movies since the 1970s, and dedicated Indian video stores have popped up in the past decade, as South Asian immigration increased. The Capitol Cinema in Balmoral was turned into a Bollywood cinema in the late 1990s, and four years ago, Raj and Seema Sharma bought it and started screening films daily.

They also wanted to import and distribute Bollywood films, which was a Himalayan task: not so long ago, virtually all Bollywood videos in New Zealand were pirated. Nobody wanted to pay to see the films at the Capitol and no video store wanted to pay for legal copies because cheaper pirated copies were available before the official ones.

So the Sharmas started taking the pirates to court: they say they've taken 30 cases so far, and claim that four companies have been pushed to bankruptcy by the fines and damages awarded. "It's very difficult to change the culture - it's the hardest thing I've done in my life," says Raj. "But we're right, and we're losing money [because of piracy] and the producers are losing money."

Capitol isn't the only legal Bollywood distributor in New Zealand, but it's thanks to its efforts to stamp out the scalpers that about 15 to 20 "mainstream" rental stores around the country - including United Video and Blockbuster branches - are willing to stock Bollywood films. And now that they can show films virtually the same day as they're released in India, even multiplex cinemas, those bastions of mainstream entertainment, have started experimenting with Bollywood.

About four months ago, both Hoyts at Wairau Park (supplied by Capitol) and Village Skycity cinemas in Manukau and Queen St (supplied by Dream Productions) started showing Bollywood films. The moderately-sized audiences are mostly Indian, but as the odd Bollywood film slips into the festival seasons and films such as Monsoon Wedding appeal to non-Indian audiences, the multiplex owners hope the audience will broaden.

It helps that Bollywood has started wooing its non-resident Indian audiences with films set in Melbourne and Vancouver. And in New Zealand: over 100 feature and TV ad crews have landed in Queenstown alone. The 1999 hit Say I Love You (Kaho naa pyaar ha), which was set partially in the alpine town (rather than just using it as random, unexplained scenery as is often the case), has been credited for helping increase the number of Indian tourists to Aotearoa from 3000 to 18,000 a year. But the number of Indian crews heading to Godzone has diminished in the past couple of years - because of the high New Zealand dollar, better government incentives elsewhere and cheaper labour closer to home in Malaysia, Thailand or even Prague.

While the New Zealand film industry has benefited from American interest, New Zealand production companies which help Bollywood film crews argue that given the industry's fickle nature, it's safer to have more than one foreign string to our bow. Or should that be, more than one string to our sitar?