Understanding the cinema in India, to a Western spectator, is complex, it breaks away from the codes and aesthetic parameters established in the West. Out of conversations held by several film-makers, critics and actors, the intention of this work is to contribute to and to make this enriching reality known in our context. Dealing with topics related to censorship in cinema, the still significant discrimination of women within the cinematographic industry, which is just a reflection of what happens, even at a greater scale, outside it, and the arrival, on the one hand, of globalization through the attempt by the American cinematographic production companies to enter the Indian market and, on the other, the increasingly bigger presence of multiplexes in big shopping centres.

“I do not like the term ‘Bollywood’ very much. This is so because fifteen years ago, or so, I used to write about cinema and we used the word ‘Bollywood’ to criticise, to make fun of the horrible films that the industry produced, so whenever we said “Ah, that is a ‘Bollywood’ film”, we did not mean all the films released by the Bombay industry. But now, the term ‘Bollywood’ has become a positive term, and everybody takes pleasure in calling themselves ‘Bollywood’.
The government treats cinema as if it were the hen of golden eggs, it favours the biggest production companies, you know. If a film, because of the distribution companies, does not raise enough money in its first two weeks, it is withdrawn from the cinemas. Everything is designed for big commercial productions. The rental of the cinemas is extremely high. The tax system is completely ridiculous and out of fashion. It is a system designed by the British in order to make life impossible to the film-makers who made films which were slightly risky, anti-British or anti-imperialist. So you have no other choice but to make films with no content, with songs and dances for the general public. This system is kept for the government to get some profit from each of the films which are released. But those who work for making them, the directors, producers and so on, suffer a lot, so I got to the conclusion that they system is made to make film-production difficult, but even so we keep on making them, that is the only thing we can do.”