For foreign audiences, Indian cinema long has been closely associated with Bollywood — sprawling, colorful spectacles that feature songs and dance routines — and often one of the three Khans (the unrelated trio of Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh).
But there has been a shift across the past year as focus turned from Mumbai, which had suffered a string of misses until Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan took off on a tear early this year, toward Southern India.
The Indian film industry is one of the world’s most prolific, but it somehow feels like a switch has been flipped with interest from non-diaspora audiences.
In part, that’s down to S.S. Rajamouli and his Telugu-language pic RRR, which became a phenomenon unto its own with worldwide box office appeal and awards recognition from myriad bodies including the Academy, which made “Naatu Naatu” the first song from an Indian movie to win an Oscar.
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