Kannada movie posters
Before I moved to India I don’t think I was aware of how many different film industries there are here. Everyone’s heard of Bollywood (which is in Mumbai, for Hindi films), but many of the regional languages have their own movie industries too. (And most of them seem to have -ollywood nicknames …) Karnataka (the state where Bangalore is located) has “Sandalwood” for Kannada movies, and awesome silkscreened posters like this one are plastered all over the city every week to advertise the new releases. (There are regular photographic posters, too, but I love these much more.) Looking for the new posters every week is one of the rituals of my work commute.
Admittedly this is not actually a poster for a Kannada movie, but I think that drawing of Brendan Fraser is too funny to not post. I have a few more poster photos on Flickr, though, if you’d like to see more.
A couple months ago one of my friends let me tag along to watch part of a shoot for a Tamil movie her friend was starring in (!). We drove down to an aircraft hangar in Tamil Nadu that was serving as a standin for a Sri Lankin airport and the site of the climactic battle scene of the movie. Actually, I have little idea what was going on, but there was a satisfying amount of fake blood, a lead pipe used as a weapon and lots of compressed air creating suitably dramatic hair. A lot of the fighting was done with both parties standing about ten feet apart and pretending to hit each other, with camera angles hiding the distance between them.