Bollywood in Eltham

Bollywood comes to town
In the 1960s and '70s, Taranaki's Indian community would descend on the Eltham Town Hall to watch Bollywood movies.
Former Opunake resident Christine Nana was among them.
"We'd all get really dressed up - me in a new dress that my mother had tailor-made and my brothers in shirts and flares."
She says her mum and dad, Shantaben and KeshaBhai Nana, weren't impressed by the fashions of the day, especially their sons' long hair. "Many a heated word was said about the length of hair in my home," she says.
The Nana clan, who owned a fruit shop in Opunake, would trundle to Eltham in "my dad's flash Humber Hawk" car.
Outside the hall on Stanners Street the Indian families would wait in cold southerly winds for the projectionist to arrive. "The ladies would be in colourful saris and jewels, though many donned a cardy (cardigan) to ward off the wind," Christine says.
The men were less grand in European-style suits. "My brothers, who were in their teens, would be strutting about hoping to catch a glad eye or two,"
But they would always have their little sister tagging along with them. "I don't think they were too impressed by this," she says.
"After fellowship and showing off our nice clothes, we'd all descend upon the town hall to be entertained by the latest film. Sometimes the films were classic love stories with the songs, music and overacting - these I found the most boring. The best ones were those that told a story from the Mahabarata or the Ramayana (both Hindu epics). These always had special effects (and still the songs and music), which I found fascinating and appealed to my sense of fantasy as a child."
Christine, born in 1965, was just a babe bundled up in her father's overcoat when she began going to Eltham for Bollywood weekends. "They happened fairly regularly - every few months I think - and virtually the whole of the Taranaki Gujarati community would descend upon Eltham. I can't remember how many, but enough to fill Eltham Town Hall. I don't know what the locals made of us."

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