Catholics go Bollywood

The Indian Express reports:

Treading uncharted territory, the social service wing of the Delhi Catholic Church is producing a full-fledged Hindi feature film, with all the ingredients of a typical Bollywood blockbuster, including a very hot item number.

Aisa Kyun Hota Hain, slated to hit theatres in October 2005, is possibly the first feature film produced by the church worldwide.

“As far as I know, this is the first film produced by the church anywhere in the world,” Fr Dominic Emmanuel, spokesman of the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese (DCA) said.

Can it really be that no branch of the Catholic church has ever, ever, ever produced a film before? I would be very surprised if this were true, but then, the world is full of surprises, and I imagine it all depends on how you parse a phrase like “produced by the church”. For example, The Spitfire Grill (1996) was produced by the fund-raising arm of a Catholic charity, I believe, but the money for it might not have come from the diocese’s operating budget, per se — that sort of thing.

Anyway, it is not clear from the story what the specifically Catholic nature of this film will be (we are told simply that “the film explores relationships at three levels — that of mother and son, husband and wife and friendship”), but we do know, at least, that “a Sikh basketball coach” will provide a bit of comic relief, and in the words of producer Fr. Emmanuel himself, “It is about communal harmony — the film even has a Buddhist character.”

UPDATE: Hmmm, the only recent film bearing this name at the IMDB is a movie slated to open in August, directed by Mahesh Bhatt and starring Rati Agnihotri, and the plot outline given there is: “A single mother contend with her playboy son’s newly diagnosed case of HIV infection.” That’s all the info the IMDB has — but it sure sounds like the same film. Could be interesting.

UPPERDATE: Come to think of it, I also wonder what ever became of those two duelling Bollywood films about the death of Graham Staines, a Christian missionary who was killed along with his two sons by a Hindu mob. As reported nearly two years ago, The Murder of a Missionary was supposed to take Staines’s side, while Dara: The Hero was supposed to be a tribute to Dara Singh, the man who was convicted of burning the Staineses to death.