Indian-origin doctor-filmmaker’s rom-com set for London Film Festival premiere

London, Oct 13 (PTI) An Indian-origin doctor-filmmaker’s spin on the traditional tropes associated with Bollywood romantic comedies and shot speedily over 18 days in Vancouver, Canada, is set for its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) next week.

Roshan Sethi’s ‘A Nice Indian Boy’ tells the story of Naveen Gavaskar, played by Indian-American actor Karan Soni, and Jay Kurundkar, played by American actor Jonathan Groff who is adopted by migrant Indian parents and brought up in a Maharashtrian milieu. A chance meeting in a temple and a shared love of Bollywood films, especially the 1990s romantic hit ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’, sets the course for an emotional and joyful ride towards their big fat Indian wedding.

“I grew up with ‘DDLJ’ like most Indian people abroad, but it very much came to me as part of the script adaptation of the play, which was written by Madhuri Shekar and first went up in America in 2012,” Sethi told PTI ahead of the LFF screenings scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday.

“I'm really excited for the London Film Festival audiences to see it. I think independent film is in a really, really tough place right now, where in America at least it's very hard to make independent films with a diverse cast. So, to have an independent film of a non-negligible budget that contains non-white people is, in and of itself, right now a miracle,” said the filmmaker, who practices as a doctor for part of the year.

“I think Hollywood is one of the most racist industries in America, so I hope that stories like this get seen as widely as possible, because I think there's a sort of return to non-diversity that is underway in the subtext that I feel in the industry every day,” he cautions.

The screenplay of the film, which has been adapted from the original play by Eric Randall, has threads of Sethi’s life with real-life partner Soni woven into the narrative.

“I was closeted until around six years ago and it took me a long time to come out, in part because I was so busy working in the hospital and preoccupying myself with various different careers in an effort to distract myself from what I knew I had to eventually acknowledge. But after I came out, I met Karan Soni, who's the lead actor in the film and my life partner now. So, our love story is obviously somewhat baked in,” he shares.

“He plays a doctor in the movie, which wasn't the case in the play or in the original version of the script. And, we took a lot of what we had been through with our own families and our own love story and blended it into what was already very much there in the play,” Sethi adds.

Indian actor Harish Patel plays the father and Indian-American comedian Zarna Garg makes her film debut as the mother of the lead character.

“We're not watching him come out to his family, but he is, in a way, gay in theory and not in practice. They've never had to acknowledge the reality of his sexuality, because he's never brought a partner home to his family before. So, he's in a middle zone,” explains Sethi.

“You can tell in the movie that there is discomfort among the family with the fact of his sexuality, but not sheer opposition. And in fact, his parents are very much trying to understand him and the sort of modern sentiments about sexuality, which I do hope lots of people connect with,” he said.

In that context, Sethi is hopeful the film will appeal to a wide audience worldwide including in India, a country he sees as traditionally embracing multiple ways of being.

“I don't think it will be as simple as gay people will love the movie, or that the movie is for gay people. I think one of the pitfalls we've fallen into in the era of so-called diverse entertainment is that movies are very niche and for very niche audiences, when the truth is that the more specific you make them, the more people they end up appealing to,” said the filmmaker.

‘A Nice Indian Boy’ is about a family's acceptance of love and other fundamental issues since the beginning of time, including a traditional song-and-dance wedding. But having organised two big fat weddings for the film already, Sethi’s plan for his own wedding with Soni is a rather modest one.

“Both of us are shy in different ways, and that's probably what's behind that. But I do know that we are in the minority as far as that dream for a wedding goes...There's just something about weddings. You feel that you're in the presence of something very significant and profound, that you are out of the everyday and the mundane and you're in front of something big and ancient. So, I love weddings. Just for myself, I would prefer a modest one,” he smiles. PTI