Thousands expected for Bollywood premiere in Toronto

Toronto officials and Bollywood film buffs are anticipating a massive turnout Thursday, when the city will host the landmark premiere of Indian epic Guru.

Mani Ratnam's highly anticipated film will make its debut at Toronto's historic Elgin Theatre. City officials expect 10,000 fans to show up to seethe film's co-stars and rumoured couple Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai walk the red carpet.

"It's been overwhelming," Roger Nair, Guru's Canadian distributor, told CBC News. "We've been getting calls from across the country."

The event is said to be India's first mainstream international release and the first time a Bollywood film has ever had its world premiere in Toronto. The Hindi-language film is both a love story and a tale about a man's rise from poverty to become one of India's richest businessmen.

"It's huge," said Karim Dhalla, who owns a video store in the city's east-end neighbourhood known as Little India.

"We're making our films global now. We want people to recognize that South Asian films are huge and Bollywood is here to stay."

Guru's Toronto premiere tickets for which fetched up to $500 each has also made headlines across India, with a host of Indian press and television crews in town to cover the event.

City seeks more Bollywood

With an estimated 350,000 people of South Asian descent living in the Greater Toronto Area, and more than one million across the country, Bollywood and its films have increasingly grown in prominence domestically.

While Indian producers have filmed projects in Toronto for years, Thursday's premiere is seen as a major step forward both in promoting the massively popular Bollywood film industry and strengthening its working relationship with Canada.

So, city officials have had a hand in organizing the event, in everything from securing visitors visas for the cast and filmmakers to blocking off a section of road outside of the theatre on Yonge Street, in a busy section of downtown Toronto.

Bollywood frenzy at TIFF

Last September, organizers of the Toronto International Film Festival screened the recent movie Never Say Goodbye as a gala the first Bollywood film ever presented that way at the festival.

A frenzied, sold-out crowd of more than 500 fans packed a Toronto concert theatre for the screening and the subsequent discussion panel featuring director Karan Johar and stars Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan (father of Guru's Abhishek Bachchan). Hundreds of others waited outside for a glimpse of the stars.

The screening and panel took place on the same day the festival showed the acclaimed film Babel, starring Brad Pitt. Festival organizers have said that the crowd that gathered for the Bollywood film was several times larger than the turnout for tabloid favourite Pitt.

Film distributor Nair, who immigrated to Canada from India in 1988, has worked behind the scenes on movies for the past 10 years and said he feels Canadians are ready to see a lot more South Asian cinema.

"India does have an amazing, rich culture and Canadians are very receptive of anything that is culturally rich," he said. "I don't believe that only Indians watch Bollywood films."

The Guru premiere takes place a day before its worldwide release. The film is scheduled to hit theatres across Canada on Friday.