Bollywood actors have huge fan following in Mongolia

Kolkata: Bollywood actors are immensely popular in Mongolia, which shows that cinema surpasses language and borders, Speaker (chairman) of Mongolian parliament Damdinglin Demberei today said.

"The Mongolian people love to watch Indian movies. They are fans of yesteryear actors ranging from Raj Kapoor to Amitabh Bachchan to present day Bollywood stars," Demberei said at the inauguration of second Mongolian film festival at the state-run film complex Nandan here. "The ties between the two countries go beyond politico-economic exchanges and are a cultural communion between creative persons," Demberei, heading a cultural delegation to the country, said, recalling the visit of his country``s president to India last year. He said he was mesmerised by his visit to Jorasanko, the birthplace of Rabindranath Tagore, and referred to a member of his team who had spent some time at Santiniketan. Demberei, whose visit followed that of Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar to Mongolia earlier, expressed hope that the inaugural screening of the popular film ``The Mongals`` will impress audience. Shyamal Sen, former high court chief justice and president of Cine Central, a premier film club of the city, said with the world rocked by strife and violence, cultural exchanges between the two ancient nations can show a way-out. Explaining how Mongolian cinema had been strongly influenced by the cinema of Russia, which makes it different from cinematic developments in the rest of Asia, CEO of Nandan Nilanjan Chattopadhyay said very little has been known about their movies by the film-going audiences here. "After the socialist revolution, the Mongolian People``s Revolutionary Party decided to use movies as an instrument of mass education and from 1926 mobile projection facilities would regularly show Soviet films to the Mongolian people." However, it was a long journey thereafter with the first colour movie ``The Golden Yurt (Altan Orgoo)`` in 1961, based on a folk tale. "We should know about their films, the recent movie ``Genghis Khan, Eternal Power of the Sky``, the first Mongolian-Japanese co-production, the German-Mongolian co-productions ``The Story of the Weeping Camel`` (the 2003 film was nominated for an Academy Award as foreign documentary in 2005) and ``The Cave of the Yellow Dog`` (2005), the 2008 historical film ``A Pearl in the Forest``," he said. PTI