On a slightly long-haul flight last night, I found myself watching Superboys of Malegaon - the film came recommended from interviews of many stalwarts such as Javed Akhtar, Farah Khan, and Siddhant Chaturvedi, reviewers like Anupama Chopra, media personalities like Saurabh Dwivedi, and endorsed by many guests on his show. So it had been on my watchlist for some time now - the long haul flight gave me a chance to clear up my list [I also started watching an old Hollywood classic Fargo, which has been on my watchlist for years now! Will probably finish the remaining 40 minutes later tonight.]
What was more of a clear-my-watchlist exercise ended up staying with me long after the screen went dark. The film refused to leave my mind, even though I had started watching another right after. Superboys of Malegaon is an easy film to like - rustic, warm, humorous, and deeply human - but where its stands out is on balancing emotion and inspiration without tipping into sentimentality.
For the uninitiated [SPOILER ALERT], the film is about a group of young boys/men in the late 90s/2000s, in Malegaon - a small powerloom town in Maharashtra, who decide to make films with almost no money, no formal training, and no access to the traditional machinery of cinema. They borrow, improvise, recycle, and reimagine. Costumes are stitched together from whatever is available, special effects are invented with household materials, and stories are adapted by spoofing popular Bollywood and Hollywood films - but filtered through the realities, humour, and anxieties of their own lives. What emerges is not parody in the mocking sense, but homage to popular cinema and a stubborn belief that storytelling belongs to everyone, not just those in Mumbai studios. The film quietly shows how these amateur productions become a source of joy, pride, and collective identity for the town itself, binding people together through shared laughter and shared labour.
The film is a tribute to grassroots cinema and the passion of amateur filmmakers, but for me it was also about its message on bias for action. Often preached in TED talks and inspirational videos, bias for action is a much abused term but the story of Malegaon's film-makers illustrates how rather than be constrained by the limitations of your surroundings, bias for action can lead to creating something unique and lasting; and how it can inspire a generation towards something greater. But more importantly provide those involved, with a life purpose. A dialogue in the movie which embodies this message is: "Bahot kiya vo mere liye, hum sab ke liye! Sholay ki shooting mein zindagi mein pehli bar mereko subah uthne mein maza aaya. Malegaon mein kitne log picture banare. Pehle kya tha idhar?"
What made the message of the movie even more compelling is the knowledge that the original documentary capturing Malegaon’s cottage film industry was released way back in 2012. Watching 'Superboys of Malegaon' now, I could not help but wonder what might have been possible if the moment had been seized by policymakers then. With the right policy push, this could have sparked a quiet revolution in Indian filmmaking - one not centred on scale or spectacle, but on decentralisation. Malegaon could have been a prototype rather than an exception.
I find myself asking why the Maharashtra government did not look at Malegaon as a living laboratory and attempt to replicate its spirit across the state. And then naturally - why stop at Maharashtra at all? Why shouldn’t there be local filmmaking ecosystems in a Jabalpur, Samastipur, Mehsana, or Kangra? Why not even in the remotest regions, such as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands? India is, after all, a country where every region has its own songs, dances, myths, dialects, and performance traditions. Cinema should have been the natural modern extension of that cultural inheritance. With modest investment and institutional support, we could have created hundreds, even thousands, of local movie-making hubs - small factories of imagination rooted in local soil.
Of course, the world has moved on. In today’s landscape of YouTube, Instagram, and inexpensive digital tools, we are already past the era when filmmaking required gatekeepers to grant permission. Anyone with a phone can tell a story. Yet this does not make policy irrelevant - if anything, it makes it more urgent and more interesting. Instead of making low quality disjointed reels with low watchability, we can train youth to tell meaningful stories, well crafted to reach global audiences, and enable them with tools to transcend language and thus make the appeal of their stories universal. Imagine if every region was offered accessible facilities for making short films and low-budget movies: shared equipment, editing suites, basic training, and local screening spaces. The result will not just be more content, but a million stories told in video form, consumed locally first, and then inevitably, travelling outward.
Such an ecosystem would deepen India’s movie culture in a way that multiplexes and streaming platforms alone cannot. More importantly, it would give voice to hundreds of local cultures and subcultures that are slowly being flattened by urban homogeneity. Languages, accents, rituals, and everyday experiences that rarely make it to mainstream screens would find representation, not as exotic backdrops, but as lived realities. Watching 'Superboys of Malegaon', I realised that the film is not just a tribute to a group of passionate amateur filmmakers. It is also a quiet reminder of a road not taken - and an invitation to imagine what could still be built if we take storytelling seriously as a tool of cultural survival.
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