Kollywood

What Bollywood is to Hindi moviegoers, Kollywood is to Tamils.

The Jesuits who own the property my aunt and uncle rent will also rent the pear orchard to Tamil movie crews for the day.

On Friday, I woke up to an blaring Tamil song and I'd heard it about 15 more times before I had showered and eaten breakfast. By mid afternoon my aunt and I were curious enough to go down to have a look at the filming. We didn't want to get too close but we sat up the slope from the activity and just observed. This is something I would never do back home but here no one minds.

We saw the end of one 'scene' (which was only like 30 seconds) and then the crew packed up and moved to a spot a few metres away. We watched as they set up the camera and other movie-making paraphernalia while the actors chatted in lawn chairs.

When the camera and such had been set up in the new location, these two actors who we called the stand-ins started to rehearse the next scene (also less than a minute long). The stand-ins were dressed similarly to the real actor and actress so we supposed they were there to set up the lighting and the shot while the real actors saved themselves for the real thing.

The stand-ins played around with the scene that they were supposed to film- some sort of flirtation under a tree involving a chaste leg rub and a mock fight. They seemed to be able to make decisions about how the scene was acted out and when the real actors stepped in, they actually made suggestions to them about how to move and which way to face.

After about half an hour of setting up and rehearsing, the real actors (the pic in the middle is of the real heroine getting her hair brushed) stepped in and in two takes, the clip was filmed! It seemed like a really long process for only 30 seconds of film!

Today we did some shopping- I'm going to get some awesome salwar pants made for when we go down to the plains. Salwar pants are really nice and baggy, they're going to be nice and cool. And we also had thali for lunch. Thali is served on a banana leaf and it's rice with a bunch of different curries, sambar and/or dhal that you dump on the leaf and mix with the rice as you eat it. Yum...