'Representation is not in sync with reality': Indian-Australian director Anupam Sharma on how we can see more diversity on-screen

For some, Aussie cricket legend Brett Lee may have been an odd choice for the leading man of an Indian film. 

His role in the 2015 film UnIndian saw him making his big screen debut as an English teacher who falls in love with an Indian-Australian single mother, complete with a Bollywood dance sequence.

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But for director Anupam Sharma, Lee's casting was a no-brainer.  

'I've known him as a performer," he told 9honey, having worked with him and many other sportsmen like Virat Kholi or Adam Gilchrist on TV commercials and series over his 27-year-long career.

"When this film came to me I just said, 'Who are we looking at?'," he shared, before admitting, "Once Brett Lee came on board, we just got the funding straight away."

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But it wasn't a smooth path to the silver screen for the cricketer, who was made to attend sessions with leading dramaturgs and voice coaches to ensure they were on the right track. It turned out Sharma needn't have worried. 

"I believe everyone, after a two-day session with him, said, 'Look, he's a charmer. Go for it,'" the director recalled.

Then it was a matter of surrounding themselves with an Oscar-nominated editor and an award-winning director of photography, among others, to create what would become Sharma's directorial debut.

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Sharma – who has since helmed projects such as The Run and Brand Bollywood Down Under – says cavalierly that the film's success was all about "being in the right place at the right time."

But in fact, there was a lot of blood, sweat and tears to prepare for this moment. 

Though Australia has for a long time been a melting pot of cultures, this fact has not always been reflected in our media.

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"Representation is not in sync with reality in most of the places in the West, particularly in Australia," says Sharma.

"We're just asking for the accuracy of our streets on our screens. I mean, you go on the street, you hear different accents, you see different faces, but when you go on your screens, big and small, do you see that? And the answer is an overwhelming 'No, you don't."

However, he notes that with a growing South Asian population and a correlating appetite for Indian films, there is most definitely a shift in the tide.

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Inspired by this change, he decided to put in the hard yards, spending years planning to launch the inaugural National Indian Film Festival of Australia.

The new festival will see close to 40 films in 16 different languages – including Rajasthani and Assamese, among others – screened across Australia, with many of them using the occasion to have their world or Australian premiere. 

But attendees must be prepared to face a whole new world of Indian cinema, far from the opulent Bollywood movies the nation's films have become conflated with.

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In fact, this will be one of the topics that will be covered at the many expert panels taking place across the festival, which will be held from February 13 to March 2. 

"What we're trying to do with this one is to shake some trees and say, 'Hey, Bollywood - it's great. It's dances, songs, but that is [just] a part of Indian cinema'," says Sharma.

He and other experts are eager to delve into discussion about "tapping and harnessing the power of Indian culture and Indian cinema in Australia", in particular about how "Bollywood is important, and so is Tollywood, or Mollywood, and all those 'woods' which have cropped up in India."

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Investment into South Asian cinema is an easy decision, with the Indian diaspora only amounting to 2.3 per cent of the population, yet contributing a whopping 25 per cent to the Australian Box Office through Indian films. 

Even just one sect of this huge selection – Punjabi films – are earning around $1.6 million in the box office in theaters around Australia, according to Sharma.

He adds that it's time for home-grown talent to shine, with the festival highlighting "fresh faces" to keep an eye out for, in particular from second-generation and diasporic communities who have grown up in Australia.

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Sharma says what is becoming more important culturally is that these people are able to tell their stories themselves, "rather than external agents parachuting and having their version of the culture.

"Just because a diasporic person is telling his or her story, they don't need to be supervised by someone of another culture, if they're professional enough."

This movement is something that has become more apparent in recent years, with successful Indian-Australian productions like 2016's Lion – one of our nation's highest-grossing films – at the forefront of Aussie cinema.

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"We wanted Australians of all backgrounds to see the real spectrum and the depth of the richness of Indian cinema," says Sharma of the festival's goal.

He quotes his close collaborator, Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, who says when it comes to Indian cinema, "We don't celebrate misery… We celebrate life."

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