From niche to nationwide, smaller regional cinemas find their moment

“For decades, the assumption was that scale belongs only to Hindi, Tamil and Telugu cinema, and that other language industries should be content with their corner. What we are seeing now is audiences rewarding authenticity over scale. When a story is rooted honestly in its culture, it travels far beyond its home market,” said Kaushik Das, founder and chief executive, AAO NXT, an Odia language streaming platform. Regional filmmakers have stopped imitating Bollywood and started trusting their own idiom, and audiences can feel that honesty, Das added.