Bollywood Jesus

This Easter, I was surprised when watching Channel 4's The Passion: Films, Faith & Fury that they covered one Jesus film I had never heard of. Dayasagar, also known as Daya Sagar, Oceans of Mercy, Karunamoorthy, Karunamayudu and no doubt a number of other titles was made in 1978/1985 using Hindi actors and crew. Unfortunately, I've very little knowledge of the Indian Film Industry in general (other than the fact it's the second biggest film industry in the world), and the distinctives of Bollywood specifically.

Anyway, I finally got hold of a copy in the post, and hope to watch it soon, and offer some thoughts here. However, there are a few articles around to read about the film which, thus far, has mainly been used for evangelism, (almost entirely inside India). The film is distributed in India by Dayspring International and they have a couple of articles on the film, including a "documentary" which features a couple of clips from the film. There's also a useful article at Christianity Today , and it has it's own website of sorts

I've already had a few people contacting me to ask if I know where you can buy a DVD. There are one or two places, most notably indiaplaza.com. There's also an IMDb page which has very little information at the moment other than the filming locations which included Calcutta and Mumbai. There's also a few notes on the film at expressindia.com (under the heading "God Speed") including the following.

Produced by Radha Chitra, in collaboration with Amruthrani Communications and Day Spring and CBN (USA), it's directed by Dr Vijaya Chander who also plays Christ. Earlier, he had also done a Telugu film on Christ called Karunamayudu in 1978...Dharmesh Tiwari, Suresh Chatural, Girija Shankar, Sana, Ashwini Kalsikar play key roles in this epic which is also being dubbed in Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu.

Finally, there will be a paper given on the film at the Fifth International Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture by Dwight Friesen called "Karunamayudu: A Vision of Jesus in Indian Cinema".