Meet the real-life 'Superboy of Malegaon'

Half a day's drive from India's entertainment capital, Mumbai, many in the struggling textile city of Malegaon escape the thrum of dawn-till-dusk industrial weaving looms by daydreaming about Bollywood stars.

Among them is amateur filmmaker Shaikh Nasir who, after decades of dedication to creating homemade movies, is celebrating having his own story turned into a film that will be shown internationally on the big screen.

"The cinema is, and always has been, our escape from everyday lives and our daily struggles," 50-year-old Nasir said.

Video parlours remain popular in the industrial city, where factory workers and daily wage labourers pack small dark rooms to watch Bollywood classics on large TV screens, with tickets far cheaper than a real cinema.

For them, Nasir is already a star.

As a young struggling wedding videographer and self-described "unemployed cinema buff" in the mid-2000s, Nasir took action.

"I decided to make a movie with cheap rented cameras, innovative production hacks and a crew of equally enthusiastic film fanatics," he said.

He poured in his savings and raised cash from friends to fund a series of Bollywood and Hollywood spoofs.

Most famous was Malegaon Ka Superman, or Malegaon's Superman, in which a caped superhero fights cancer-causing tobacco to save the day.

To make the hero fly, creative special effects included dragging the actor on roller skates, or strapping him to a plank attached to an out-of-sight handcart, speeding down bumpy streets.

A more ambitious scene sees the actor carried on the heads of friends concealed under a dyed sheet -- a makeshift green screen.

For camera rigs, bicycles provided tracking shots and cattle carts became improvised cranes.

The film -- in Hindi and local dialects -- made Nasir wildly popular at home.

That success spawned a slew of low-budget films in Malegaon that some Indian media dubbed "Mollywood".

"The response to our work was unbelievable," Nasir said.

In 2008, the award-winning documentary Supermen of Malegaon brought their uplifting story to international attention.

Now Nasir and his old crew are readying for the big-budget Bollywood treatment -- not to remake the movie, but a film inspired by the director's determination.

The Hindi-language Superboys of Malegaon, which will premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival, tells the tale of how Nasir's "no-budget, community-sourced movies turned his hometown into an unlikely dream factory".

Nasir worked with the production team, but in the movie version of his life, he is played by actor Adarsh Gourav, who featured in the Oscar-nominated film The White Tiger.

It was not all plain sailing.

In the face of rampant video piracy around 2014, profits from making a film tumbled.

Nasir made ends meet running a local hotel.

But production was reinvigorated as viewing habits shifted.

The rise of readily available mobile internet meant people began streaming content on their phones.

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