Harin meets Bollywood actors to promote SL as film production destination

Tourism Minister Harin Fernando has met with several Indian film industry personalities in a bid to explore possibilities of promoting Sri Lanka as a film production destination.

The Minister met popular Bollywood actors Chunky Pandey and Sanjay Kapoor, while they were in Colombo recently.

During the meeting, Minister Fernando discussed the possibility of using Sri Lanka as a location for Bollywood movies. 

“Looking forward to working with them,” he said via Twitter.

Films create a greater level of impact on tourists’ destination selection process and influence significantly visitor flows. Many destinations around the world promote their locations and cultures to attract more international films into their countries.

In June 2022, the Minister signed up with Bollywood actors Chitrangada Singh and Dino Morea to promote Sri Lanka in India.

The Indian film industry is considered to be the largest as well as busiest in the world in terms of the number of films produced, where 200 Indian films shoot abroad annually in over 65 international destinations. 

Given the growth of over-the-top (OTT) online streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Hulu, and HBO Max, over 325 million newer audiences have emerged over the recent years and that is expected to be worth over $ 5 billion by 2023. There will be more OTT productions expected produced over the upcoming years.

Having an emotionally-connected die-hard fan base – Indian cinema influences its millions of fans to travel abroad and experience the moments in the exact location where their favourite films have been shot. Especially, recent Indian films shot in Switzerland, Spain, Malaysia and Thailand had a significant impact on their inbound tourism sectors.