(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
The founders of the Australia India Film Fund have raised millions of dollars to produce films and television series that they say will work as soft diplomacy, while also making money.
Gary Cox reports.
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Bollywood has already hit Australia but we're about to see a lot more from Indian film-makers.
And it won't be all singing, dancing and romance.
"I would love to see, as a film-maker, as an Australian of Indian origin, I would love to see contemporary, modern Australian stories coming out."
Anupam Sharma is part of the new Australia-India Film Fund set up to tell Australian stories with an Indian flavour.
The scripts in development tackle some serious issues.
"They deal with wonderful stories about Indians falling in love with Australians through to controversial issues like domestic violence, which Dr Manjula O'Connor is leading out of Melbourne, to issues with spousal visas."
The fund is the brainchild of accountant Yateendra Gupta and IT entrepreneur Davendra Gupta.
"Over a period of time we saw the Indian diaspora growing here and a need for cultural integration of the Indian population with the Australian population and we saw a lot of things happening that we talked about - the student issue here and a lot of misinformation in India."
He's referring to several violent attacks on students five years ago.
He says the Indian media sensationally overstated the incidents, but it became clear Australia had work to do on its cultural relationship with India.
"Indians here are not able to correlate as much as we think they would be in the mainstream so we think there is a lot of potential here for Indian stories."
It's all possible thanks to a forty per cent tax break known as the Producer Offset Initiative, as Yateender Gupta explains.
"Our mission is very clear: we want to have a non-loss-making project, this is number one. Secondly what we want to achieve out of it is we want to have an Indian-centric film that is Australian."
So, it's not all about money.
But there is a huge potential audience.
People of Indian origin are the fastest-growing sector of the Australian population.
"We forget that Australia is growing so fast in its multicultural face that the definition of an Australian story is changing."
And with 25 million Indians living outside India, there's potential for export too.
"We hope that through this fund we can carry those Australian stories about Indians to the screen not only in Australia but to India and southeast Asia and around the world to a huge audience."
The fund is already proving a success, raising millions in investment dollars from both here and abroad.
"There are a lot of wealthy Indians in Australia who want to be part of this fund. We are getting enquiries from people in India, wealthy individuals in India, who want to do something in this space. There aren't those well-defined, professional avenues in India at this time for film funding, but here they're seeing a professional group, a well-defined structure and a company set up in Australia."
The first shows are expected within 18 months.
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