A romantic comedy helmed by an Indian-origin doctor-filmmaker is all set for its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival (LFF). The film 'A Nice Indian Boy' by Roshan Sethi was shot speedily over 18 days in Vancouver, Canada, and 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, reports PTI.
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 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 said. 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 added.
