ZURICH — Switzerland has made its own Bollywood film called Tandoori Love, replete with songs and melodrama, an Indian newspaper reported Monday.

Tandoori Love, filmed in the Swiss-German dialect and English, premiered at the weekend before a packed audience at an open-air theatre in Zurich, the Indian Express daily reported.

The film, starring German actress Lavinia Wilson and Indian actor Vijay Raaz, takes a comic look at the clash of two contrasting cultures and tells the story of how a chef in a Bollywood film crew woos a waitress in a scenic Swiss village.

According to the newspaper, the writer-director of the film, Oliver Paulus said: "I love Indian culture and its chaos…and you can imagine what happens when this chaos enters a Swiss village where everything is so perfectly organised."

The report said the film was in the Bollywood genre with a few Swiss characters and situations thrown in.

"Tandoori Love is presenting Bollywood to a Swiss audience in a way that is more palatable to them," Paulus said.

Bollywood film crews have been going to picturesque locales in Switzerland to shoot films over the past four decades.

Swiss authorities said they believe the movies are instrumental in making India one of the fastest-growing tourism markets for Switzerland as thousands of Indians visit the country every year.

But Bollywood is not yet accepted by Swiss audiences, Paulus said. The film screenings were mostly viewed by intellectuals having an interest in alternative culture or by immigrants from Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Paulus studied filmmaking in Germany and has won awards and acclaim for his earlier films, including When the Right One Comes Along (2003) and So Long, My Heart! (2006).

Bollywood, an informal term for the Hindi-language film industry based in the western Indian city of Mumbai, is the world’s largest motion picture industry, producing more than 1,000 films every year.

More than 15 million people watch at least one Bollywood film each day.

The films, generally melodramatic, have an international audience and are popular in many parts of Asia and Africa. Bollywood movies also have their own fan bases in the United States and Europe.

[dpa / Expatica]