The Director Who Made Dangal Is About to Show His Ramayana

Nitesh Tiwari steps onto the Comic-Con stage tonight with the first footage from Ramayana, a decade after Dangal became the highest-grossing Indian film in history on the back of a story about two girls learning to wrestle.

The distance between those two projects is the whole story. Dangal worked because it was intimate, specific and emotionally exact at a modest budget. Ramayana asks the same filmmaker to work at a scale that has no Indian precedent, with visual effects budgets larger than most Hindi films cost outright.

The trade’s hope is that the intimacy survives the scale. The concern, voiced quietly for two years now, is that no director has ever been asked to manage this much machinery in Indian cinema, and the ones who came closest have not always kept the film’s heart intact through it.