‘Superboys of Malegaon’ review: A fond tribute to small-town cinema dreams

Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon celebrates the cottage film industry that emerged out of the textile town in Maharashtra in the 2000s. Mollywood – Malegaon’s Bollywood – lasted long enough to be widely documented in the media, in addition to inspiring a few documentaries, notably Faiza Ahmed Khan’s Supermen of Malegaon (2008).

Mollywood was identified mostly with Nasir Shaikh, the self-taught maverick who directed such no-budget parodies of Hindi classics as Malegaon Ke Sholay and Malegaon Ka Mughal-e-Azam. Khan’s documentary captured the making of Shaikh’s Malegaon Ka Superman. Reema Kagti’s Hindi fiction feature, written by Varun Grover, keeps Nasir Shaikh at the front and centre of a story about creating cinema out of almost nothing.

In Malegaon in the late 1990s, Nasir (Adarsh Gourav) runs a video parlour that’s doing badly. A movie buff whose tastes extend to the silent-cinema icon Buster Keaton, Nasir figures out that filmmaking isn’t difficult at all. All you need is a saleable idea, a willing team and truckloads of chutzpah.

No dolly to create travelling shots? Use a bicycle or bullock cart instead. No trained actors? Recruit your friends. Nasir’s audacity wins over his equally movie-addicted pals, including Farogh (Vineet Singh), Irfan (Saqib Ayub), Akram (Anuj Duhan) and Shafique (Shashank Arora).

The spoof Malegaon Ke Sholay is a hit. Nasir gets married, to the supportive…

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