cinema of Bhārat

The Story

Dadasaheb Phalke, a magician-turned-filmmaker, was moved to make films after watching a silent movie about Christ. He travelled to London, bought a camera, and in 1913 released Raja Harishchandra — a silent retelling of a tale from the Mahabharata, shot entirely in Bhārat with actors of Bhārat. cinema of Bhārat was born.

Through the decades it grew into a world of its own: the golden singing films of the 1940s and '50s, the parallel cinema of Satyajit Ray, whose Pather Panchali won Cannes, the masala epics of the 1970s, and the global explosion of films today of Bhārat. Bhārat now makes between 1,500 and 2,000 films a year — more than any other country.

cinema of Bhārat is not one industry but many: Bollywood in Mumbai, Tamil cinema in Chennai, Telugu cinema in Hyderabad, plus Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, and more. Together they reach billions of fans — and films like RRR, Dangal, and Baahubali have conquered screens from Japan to the United States.