Bollywood film crews have been coming to Switzerland for decades to shoot dream sequences or honeymoons. And now, Switzerland hits back with its own home-grown Bollywood film, Tandoori Love. Made in the Swiss German dialect and English, the film was premiered before a packed audience at the lakeside open-air theatre in Zurich last Saturday.

The film takes a comic look at the clash of two totally different, rather contrasting cultures. “I love Indian culture and its chaos,” says Oliver Paulus, writer-director of the film. “And you can imagine what happens when this chaos enters a Swiss village where everything is so perfectly organised.” He says he had often heard irate hotel and restaurant owners swear they would never again want to have an Indian film crew in their midst. But over the years this attitude has changed. People are more open-minded now and they see the advantage it brings — India is one of the fastest growing tourism markets for this country, thanks to Bollywood.

“Tandoori Love is not a Bollywood film, it is a film completely different from anything you’ve ever seen. It is presenting Bollywood to a Swiss audience in a way that can be more palatable to them” insists Paulus. Isn’t Bollywood already well accepted and understood by Swiss audiences? “No,” he says. “Bollywood film screenings are confined to Arthouse Cinema and viewed by intellectuals who have an interest in alternative cultures.” Or perhaps are watched by the immigrants comprising Turkish, East European and Middle Eastern nationalities.

But with so many songs, such emotions and drama, Tandoori Love does come across as being in the same genre as the thousands churned out in Mumbai’s dream factory, with a few Swiss characters and situations thrown in.

Paulus chose the cast very carefully, subjecting even well-known actors to a screen test. Lavinia Wilson, a German actress, aspiring to make it big in Hollywood plays Sonja (pronounced Sonia). Vijay Raaz, whom we all know from numerous Hindi movies but remember most for his comic role in Monsoon Wedding, “is a marvellous actor,” according to Paulus. Shweta Agarwal (whom we know from TV serial Dekho Magar Pyaar Se) plays the tantrum throwing diva who, accompanied by her mom on shooting sets, is giving the director and the producer (played by Ganesh Yadav and Aasif Sheikh) constant jitters.

He says he did a lot of research for the film, saw hundreds of Hindi movies including A, B and C grade ones, studied the lives and work of cooks in India, met dozens of film personalities in order to write the story (actually co-write with Stefen Hillebrand) from two different points of view, bringing in the mutual prejudices that the two cultures have towards each other. Incidentally, the Indians are often referred to as “Tamils” an epithet that has a slightly pejorative connotation here in the aftermath of the Jaffna war that brought almost 25,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to this country. Over the years, these Tamils have actually endeared themselves to the native population with their hardworking, docile and clean ways. But they nevertheless remain consigned to the lowest rungs of Swiss society, as they perform mostly menial jobs. Whereas the Indian expatriates here, some of whom might be Tamils, constitute a highly skilled segment of the workforce.

Born in 1969 in Dornach, a small town near Basel, Oliver Paulus studied film making in Germany’s Baden Wüttemberg and won several awards and worldwide acclaim for his earlier films like “When the right one comes along”, “So long, my heart” etc. Is there a common strain that runs in all of his movies? “There is,” he admits. “All my movies have as their leading character an underdog, who has a dream, wants to achieve something and has to fight for it. I find the subject emotionally touching, when there is someone on the fringes of society but is proud of himself, believes in himself and strives for something.” In Tandoori Love, Raaja, the cook, is such an underdog.

Is there a scope for more such films based on Bollywood themes? “I don’t see much space for that. But who knows, that might just happen.” He expects the film to strike a chord with the NRI populations worldwide as he thinks most NRIs may be able to relate to the clash of cultures as shown in the movie.