CHENNAI, INDIA—Days before the May opening of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the director of the first Bollywood film invited for an official screening gave a shout-out to his colleagues in a long-overlooked arm of the Indian film industry.

“There’s a whole new wave in Tamil cinema,” said Anurag Kashyap, whose film Gangs of Wasseypur was screened at Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival. “They’ve made the most extraordinary films in the last two years and, at the national level, people don’t even know about it.”

Spread across southeastern India, northeastern Sri Lanka and other parts of Southeast Asia, the Tamils number some 65 million people and possess one of the world’s oldest cultures. But in Hindi-dominated India, they — and their movies — are usually ignored or dismissed. Read the rest of the article here.

- Article and image originally published by The Star.