The popular south actor Sidharth has now opened up on the ongoing debate of Bollywood vs the South film industry. The actor has said that how calling big south Indian films pan-Indian is disrespectful. Rather, we should start accepting Indian films as Indian films and not call them Pan Indian. And he also added on saying that there is no such thing called as ‘regional films’ rather every film made in India is an Indian film.
As quoted by IANS, Sidharth once said in an interview, “I said in a Hindi interview, ‘why do you want to cross over the seas? Why don’t you want to cross over to inside India? Why don’t you first start watching films made in other languages? Why don’t you first start considering Indian films as Indian films?’ There’s no wood, no regional. As a result of that, they have come up with this comedy called pan-Indian.”
He added, “Pan-Indian is a very disrespectful word because the term is being used to describe that a regional film means there is something called an Indian film, which comes from Bollywood. That’s what it means. It means that you don’t have to qualify Hindi films with any word, but if it is coming from regional cinema, they are not just regional films but they are pan-Indian. That is nonsense! All films are Indian films.”
He continued, saying, “Is that to say that there was no pan-Indian cinema 15 years back? Indian cinema is Indian cinema. My boss Mani Ratnam made a film called ‘Roja’, which everybody in India saw. Nobody said it was a pan-Indian film.”
He further said, “Today, my friends in Bengaluru have made ‘KGF’. I am so proud of them. ‘KGF’ is an Indian film. It is a Kannada film. You can watch it in any language you want, but it is an Indian film made by the Kannada industry. The term pan-India should be removed if you ask me. It should just be called an Indian film. Otherwise, refer to it in the language it was made in.”
