According to Priya Sharan and Jai Balakrishnan, Indian culture and movies are intertwined.
The two are part of the leadership team behind New Brunswick Movie Club, a non-profit organization that brings the Indian community in New Brunswick and other Atlantic provinces together by screening the most popular Indian movies in local theatres.
“We connect with our own people, and the community sit together, watch it together, have fun, the way we used to enjoy back home. That’s something that’s a one-of-a-kind experience,” said Sharan, the club’s director who works as an IT consultant in Moncton.
She added that the positive response from the community is what has kept the club going since it began in 2018.
Balakrishnan, a chemical engineer in Fredericton and the club’s director of communications, said the club helps Indian immigrants find community in the province.
The club is an off-shoot of Edmonton Movie Club, which handles the licensing of the films the New Brunswick iteration screens.
This past weekend, the club celebrated the beginning of Diwali with a double-feature of Tamil films at the Vogue Cinemas in Sackville. They showed the spy-thriller Sardar, followed by the rom-com Prince.
In India, the two films are part of a “Diwali clash” for the top spot at the box office, according to the newspaper The Indian Express.
Driven by a passion for film
In India, festivals like Diwali are often accompanied by hotly anticipated releases by the country’s biggest stars, Sharan said.
“For every festival, we for sure get together as a family, extended family, we all go to the theatres to sit and watch a movie.”
If a big star has a release that doesn’t fall on a festival, “we turn it actually into a festival, even if it is not a festival, so Indian culture and movies are intertwined,” she said.
For Sharan, movies have always been intertwined with her life. Her father is an actor in South India. As a kid, she loved visiting his sets. She came to Canada in 2018, after living in Dubai for many years.
Balakrishnan has been in New Brunswick since he became a student at UNB in 2005.
His passion for movies is so strong it once took him across the border. In 2018, one of his favourite South-Indian stars, Rajinikanth, released a movie called 2.0.
“I tried desperately to bring it to New Brunswick, and I could not,” he said.
“So I travelled to Westbrook in Maine, near Portland, Maine, early in the morning at five o’clock. I went to the show there and watched the movie and came back the same day.”
When Sharan arrived in 2018, she was looking for a way to see Indian movies in New Brunswick. She met Balakrishnan and they decided to join forces and start the club.
“My family, Jai’s family, we all like watching movies … then we realized the whole community wants something like that so we thought, why not? Why not do it?”
Bringing the community together
According to Balakrishnan, the atmosphere at one of their screenings “is electrifying.”
Sharan said the experience is something people are longing for.
“When people come in, [they] get to watch and relax for the two and a half hours or three hours of movie, and then connect with their friends and family there and then feel like you’re back home,” she said.
“You know, that is something we sometimes do miss.”
In recent years, chains like Cineplex have begun showing some Indian films but Sharan said they have a narrow scope.
Most of the Indian movies shown by Cineplex are Hindi cinema, Sharan said, better known as Bollywood. She said people sometimes assume that Bollywood is the only film industry in the country and Hindi is the only language.
According to the most recent census, there are 122 languages spoken in India by 10,000 people or more.
“We have movies in every region of India, every part of India. So what we did is … we focus on all Indian movies,” Sharan said.
So far, they’ve shown films in five different languages.
As people from different regions of India immigrate to New Brunswick, the club has been asked to screen films in specific languages, Sharan said.
“We try and get that movie for them,” she said. “So that way, they get their festive day, you know, by watching that movie together with their community.”
In the 17 years since Balakrishnan came to the province, he’s seen the Indian population grow and change, thanks to things like the federal Atlantic Immigration Program.
He said cultural initiatives like the New Brunswick Movie Club are important for attracting and retaining immigrants.
“Food, entertainment, and hobbies, like activities for the kids and those sorts of things are very, very important,” he said. “And we feel [they are] extremely essential for immigrants like us to get to know this place.”
Sharan said they’ve found community support, but wish there were more theatres available across the province in which to host screenings.