Shah Rukh Khan praises South cinema at Locarno: 'India's best storytelling comes from the South'

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan was one of the highlights of the 77th Locarno Film Festival, where he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award. In his acceptance speech and subsequent interactions, Khan displayed his natural charm and grace, captivating audiences with his wit and deeply insightful conversations about Indian cinema.

During a Q&A session, Shah Rukh Khan acknowledged the growing popularity of South Indian cinema domestically, noting that films produced in this region were transcending language, cultural, and traditional barriers within the country.

"To regionalize Indian Cinema is wrong. Our country is so vast. We don't have different dialects across the nation; we have different languages across the nation. There are Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Odia—so many languages," said SRK.

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Shah Rukh Khan recently secured the biggest commercial success of his career with Jawan, a film that showcased the talents of South Indian cinema. While Jawan was a Bollywood production, it was written, directed, edited, and scored by South Indian artists. The film took the global box office by storm, earning more than Rs1000 crore in ticket sales.

"To me, one of the greatest storytelling parts of India is the South. They have outstanding storytelling. Malayalam cinema, Telugu cinema, and Tamil cinema have some of the greatest superstars in our country, and we all know it in India. Recently, with Jawan, RRR, and Baahubali, everybody has started noticing it," SRK noted.

Jawan was not the first time Shah Rukh Khan collaborated with a South Indian director. He expressed his admiration for South filmmakers' penchant and skill in creating big-scale, larger-than-life movies, a quality he believes is lacking in the Bollywood style of filmmaking.

"Cinematically and technically, South Cinema is really, really fantastic. The South has a very specific type of storytelling—very robust, with lots of music, and they love their heroes to be larger than life. I really enjoyed it. I have never seen a film like that. I would be just clapping my hands, and it would be the greatest moment in the history of mankind. It's very theatrical, lovely, and colourful," SRK said, describing Jawan as India's first "fusion of Hindi and South Indian cinema."

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