Indian film crews keep choosing Australia as rebates, locations and a festival align

When the Telugu thriller Anaganaga Australia Lo opened in March 2025, it carried an unusual line in its production notes. The whole film had been shot in Australia, across 83 locations and 122 days of photography, most of them in and around Melbourne. A few weeks earlier, the Indian-Australian drama Hindi Vindi had reached Australian cinemas, filmed around Sydney with development support from Screen Australia. Two features, two languages, one shooting country. Both sit inside a working relationship between Indian cinema and Australian locations that reaches back decades, and that screen agencies and tourism bodies on both sides now pursue with money and policy.

Bollywood’s long run on Australian locations

Indian producers have been pointing cameras at Australian scenery since the late 1990s. Press accounts identify Daud (1997) as the first Indian feature to use Australian locations. The turning point came with Salaam Namaste (2005), directed by Siddharth Anand and led by Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta, widely recorded as the first Indian film shot entirely in Australia. Principal photography ranged across Victoria, taking in Melbourne, the Great Ocean Road and Rye Beach on the Mornington Peninsula. Sydney had already featured in Dil Chahta Hai (2001), with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge framing the friendship drama’s turning points.

The list grew quickly. Melbourne hosted much of Chak De! India (2007), including the hockey sequences that drive the film’s final act. Singh Is Kinng (2008), starring Akshay Kumar, shot a large part of its story around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008) returned to Sydney, and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) filmed sequences in Melbourne. The pattern held across a decade. Indian directors used Australian cities and coastlines as a clean, photogenic backdrop that read as aspirational to audiences at home, usually for song sequences and holiday interludes rather than whole productions.

Those choices carried a tourism dividend. Reporting from the period recorded a rise of around 18 per cent in Indian visitors to Victoria after Salaam Namaste and Chak De! India, both filmed in the state, and Australia’s tourism minister of the day publicly credited Salaam Namaste with lifting Indian arrivals. Those figures are contemporary claims rather than audited counts, yet the pattern drew little dispute. State agencies noticed, and began treating an appearance in a hit Hindi film as a marketing asset worth chasing.

Two 2025 films that put Australia on the call sheet

Anaganaga Australia Lo, released on 21 March 2025, is a Telugu-language thriller directed by Taraka Rama and produced under the Sahana Art Creations banner. Its distinguishing feature is production geography. The film was shot entirely in Australia, using 83 locations across 122 days, with Melbourne as the principal base. Reviewers described a neo-noir crime story built around suspense and dark comedy, carried by a cast led by Jyothinath Goud and Saanya Bhatnagar. For a mid-budget Telugu production to base an entire schedule in Australia marks a clear step beyond the location visits of earlier decades.

Hindi Vindi took a different route to the same country. Directed by Ali Sayed and released in Australian cinemas on 27 February 2025, it is an Indo-Australian co-production shot around Sydney, with development support from Screen Australia. The cast pairs Indian actor Neena Gupta, as a visiting grandmother, with Mihir Ahuja as a teenage musician named Kabir, and features Australian singer Guy Sebastian in his first acting role. The story turns on music bridging language and generation inside a diaspora family. The film has been described as among the first features connected to the Australia-India co-production framework, which places it near the front of a policy experiment rather than at its margins.

The rebates that make the sums work

The commercial case rests on Australia’s screen incentives. The Location Offset, aimed at large-budget productions shot in Australia, was permanently raised from 16.5 per cent to 30 per cent for projects starting principal photography on or after 1 July 2023, with the higher rate legislated in mid-2024. To qualify, a production needs at least A$20 million in qualifying Australian expenditure, or an average of A$1.5 million per hour for a television series, and must meet a training obligation designed to build local crew depth. The Post, Digital and Visual Effects Offset runs at 30 per cent and applies to post-production, digital and visual effects work carried out in Australia regardless of where filming happened, with a lower entry point of A$500,000 in qualifying expenditure.

State and territory agencies stack further rebates on top of the federal offsets. Screen NSW, VicScreen, Screen Queensland, the South Australian Film Corporation and ScreenWest each run attraction funds, several offering more than 10 per cent on eligible spend on a case-by-case basis. For official co-productions, the Producer Offset is the relevant lever, worth 40 per cent for eligible feature films and 20 per cent for other formats. The framework behind all of this is the Australia-India Audiovisual Co-production Agreement, signed in Mumbai on 10 March 2023 by trade minister Don Farrell and India’s information and broadcasting minister Anurag Singh Thakur, and announced by prime ministers Anthony Albanese and Narendra Modi. Official co-production status lets a film count as national content in both countries and reach each side’s funding and offsets.

Tourism Australia and the state screen offices

Tourism Australia has treated Indian cinema as a promotional channel for years. In 2017 it appointed actor Parineeti Chopra as the first Indian woman on its Friend of Australia panel, using her profile to reach Indian travellers. State screen offices court the productions themselves. Film Victoria, now VicScreen, established a dedicated fund to attract high-budget Indian films and television to the state, and Melbourne’s long run of Indian shoots reflects that pull. Screen NSW and Screen Queensland compete for the same work with locations, crews and rebates, so a producer weighing a schedule can often play one state package against another.

The two goals reinforce each other. A production that spends in Australia creates jobs for local crews and suppliers, and the finished film then advertises the country to a very large overseas audience. Screen agencies pitch the locations and the money; the tourism agency banks the exposure. Indian viewers who see Sydney, Melbourne or the Gold Coast on screen become a pipeline of potential visitors, a loop that Salaam Namaste demonstrated two decades ago and that streaming has since widened well beyond the opening weekend.

A festival built around the connection

The National Indian Film Festival of Australia, announced in October 2024, gave the relationship an annual showcase. Founded by Indian-Australian filmmaker Anupam Sharma with co-director Peter Castaldi, and delivered with the Australian Centre for Indian Cinema, its first edition ran from 13 February to 2 March 2025 across seven cities, presenting more than 40 titles with three world premieres and 36 Australian premieres. The 2025 program opened with Superboys of Malegaon and closed with Roam Rome Mein, and included a retrospective of the late Shyam Benegal. Superboys of Malegaon was named best feature. The festival states an aim of building Indo-Australian screen production and positioning Australia to Indian audiences as a place to film, invest and visit.

NIFFA’s 2026 edition spread across every state and territory between March and July, reaching regional centres including Broken Hill and Alice Springs. In June 2026 the festival opened in Broken Hill alongside a three-year partnership with Destination NSW, the state’s tourism body, and New South Wales was confirmed as NIFFA’s focus state for 2027. The festival and the agency pointed to more than A$90 million worth of India-focused Australian screen projects in development in the state, many backed by Screen Australia, Screen NSW and private investors. Festival director Anupam Sharma framed the point directly, saying “Indian cinema has become one of the strongest bridges between Australia and India, across culture, community, tourism and commerce.”

What the connection returns to the diaspora and to Australia

For the India-born population, which the Australian Bureau of Statistics put at 754,000 by mid-2022 and ranks as the country’s second-largest migrant group after England, the shift is personal as much as economic. Films shot down the road, in languages spoken at home, carry local streets and beaches into the cinema and back to relatives in India. For the wider country, the work brings crew jobs, post-production contracts and location spending, plus the softer return of appearing, repeatedly and attractively, in front of one of the world’s largest film audiences. Whether the current run of Indian shoots holds will depend on the rebates staying competitive and the co-production pipeline delivering finished films. On present evidence, Australia has stopped waiting for Indian crews to arrive and started competing for them.