Bollywood in Bloomfield

‘Slumdog Millionaire’, directed by Danny Boyle, wasn’t a Bollywood movie. It was a Hollywood movie with clear Bollywood roots. Its success, however, demonstrates both a new, mainstream American interest in Indian movies and the depth of their influence.

“There was a kind of stigma against a lot of [Indian] films before ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, since then, it’s kind of exploded,” said Tim Keefner, who owns Bloomfield 8 with Dean Gentile.

While Indian cinema have moved on to the radar of many Americans within the last two years, it has been growing in popularity in the United States for more than a decade.

Indeed, movies from India bring in more money in American movie theatres than any other foreign films. While independent movies can be hard to find in Hartford, the availability of Indian films is growing.

Bloomfield 8 has been showing Indian movies on one screen since it reopened under Keefner and Gentile’s tutelage two years ago. Keefner was quick to point out, however, that they show independent features when they can, although it’s difficult for new theatres to get such films. Distributors would rather go with a “known commodity.”  


Working with distributors of Indian films, a process that is becoming increasingly organized, has allowed Bloomfield 8 to show a wide variety of Indian films.

“It used to be that a guy [with the rights to a film] would travel around the country with the film in the trunk of his car,” Keefner said. Now, the theatre works consistently with a single distributor.

Keefner and Gentile, both of whom lost their jobs with a large theatre conglomerate two years ago, decided to open a theatre of their own.

East Hartford Showcase Cinemas, a theatre that consistently showed Indian films, closed about two years ago. “We decided it would be a niche,” he said.

“The Indian movies helped us to get off the ground in the beginning. They were keeping the lights on and our doors open.”

The theatre shows Bollywood films, which are in Hindi and have English subtitles.

“They’re kind of like a variety show,” Keefner said. They also show movies in Tamil and Tegulu, largely without subtitles. These movies, according to Keefner, bring in the most money.

Bloomfield 8 is one of a very few theatres that show Indian movies between Greater Boston and New York. Another, Bridgeport Showcase Cinemas, is owned by the Viacom group.

“People call us from Springfield to make sure that a movie is going to show,” Keefner said.

The most popular film of past year was ‘3 Idiots’, a film about three students at a competitive and oppressive engineering school trying to find happiness. Underscoring the increasing  and organic cross-pollination between Hollywood and Bollywood, one of the movies villains, a desperate know-it-all, was played by an Indian-American actor who also appeared on ‘The Office’.

‘3 Idiots’, the highest grossing film in Indian history, ran at Bloomfield 8 for 14 weeks.

While Bloomfield 8 has weathered the recession fairly well (movies remain an affordable luxury), business has been down a little this summer.

“The product just isn’t there,” Keefner said, referring to the quality of this summer's blockbusters.

Indian cinema, which is becoming increasingly genre-bending and, somewhat slowly and painfully, gender-and-social-structure-bending, has number of interesting new films out this summer. There’s 'Once Upon a Time in Mumbai', a movie about Mumbai's criminal underworld and 'Aisha', a take on Jane Austen’s Emma.  

And a new Indian restaurant, Naatiya, just opened up down the street. They chose the location in downtown Bloomfield, according to a waitress, because of it’s proximity to a MetLife office building, but they’re creating, along with Bloomfield 8, what Keefner calls “a social destination.”