Spirit of Bollywood blossoms in D.C. area

That’s due in large part to the appetite of 2.84 million people of Indian descent who are living in the United States, according to the 2010 Census, a population that grew by 69 percent in 10 years. In 2008, an Indian company acquired 200 movie screens across the country, including those at Loehmann’s Twin Cinema, to capitalize on the market. And although Loehmann’s is the only local theater that plays entirely Indian films, a half-dozen others regularly include Bollywood movies in their lineups.

The Washington area is home to 127,963 Asian Indian Americans, giving it the fourth-highest concentration among major U.S. metropolitan areas. Indian people have overtaken Koreans as the largest group of Asians in Virginia.

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Students at City Dance spin and stomp to Bollywood beats at one of the first student conservatories for contemporary dance in the D.C. metro area.

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Interviews with Vishal Kanoi, Bollywood instructor from Kolkata, India, and Lorraine Spiegler, Director of the City Dance conservatory.

“There are all these young, hip Indian people around, bringing this culture here,” says Tom Vick, curator of film for the Freer and Sackler galleries and author of “Asian Cinema: A Field Guide.” “Whenever we show a Bollywood movie here, we get huge crowds. And half of them will be Indian American people, but it’s also growing among the non-Indian American community.”

He credits the films’ contagious music. The songs’ fizzy pop embeds in the brain, leading to unconscious hip shaking even hours later. But Vick thinks a more surprising element drives the movies’ appeal: earnestness.

“They’re just so unaffectedly exuberant,” he says. “There’s nothing ironic in them. They’re just pure pleasure. And that might be something missing from American movies. These stories are often cliches, and you’ve seen them a thousand times, but they do them with a straight face, and you get sucked in to them.”

Ishu Krishna agrees. The 34-year-old Montgomery County native grew up watching a mix of Hollywood and Bollywood movies and is producing a feature film that draws from both types.

Krishna, a writer-director who works at a nonprofit group by day, is one of a few filmmakers who have begun making Bollywood-style films in the area. She found that there was so much talent and interest that she was able to cast the movie — her first feature-length film — entirely with local Indian American actors.

On a balmy Wednesday night, her seven-person film crew has taken over the living room of a Rockville home to shoot a scene for her romantic drama, “Arrange to Settle.” The film is about a young Indian American woman who has been unlucky in love and agrees to let her parents arrange a marriage. Then, of course, the man of her dreams walks in.

“I’m not sure about Jyothi,” says a dark-haired woman in a sparkling orange sari who plays the intended groom’s mother. “She’s way too independent.”

They do take after take of the short scene, which stands in stark contrast to a brightly colored song-and-dance extravaganza shot the previous weekend.

To appeal to American audiences, Krishna plans to weave such musical scenes into the plotline more than traditional Bollywood films do: Her lead character is a singer, and the dance sequences take place at wedding ceremonies. But she thinks people in both countries are hungry for occasional doses of jubilation.