Scenes from the film Romeo va Julietta starring Zarina Nizometdinova and Ubaydullo Omon. (AP)

Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Feb. 4 (AP): A new film industry is on the rise in this ex-Soviet state: dozens of inexpensive but profitable movies featuring pop divas and heart-wrenching plots.

With their garish colours and low budgets, the films have Bollywood elements — but with a twist reflecting Uzbekistan’s long existence in Russia’s shadow.

“They mostly combine Indian cinema and Russian drama — story lines go on like in Bollywood, but usually with no happy endings,” observed filmmaker Dmitri Korobkin.

The recent box-office hit titled Romeo va Julietta fits the pattern perfectly.

Director Bakhrom Yakubov places Shakespeare’s tragedy in modern-day Uzbekistan — an arid Central Asian country of 26 million, where Muslim traditions coexist with Western influences and Soviet legacy.

The main characters, renamed Rovshan and Jamilya, come from two rich households.

Following the Bollywood standards of decency, the star-crossed lovers never share a kiss, let alone a bed. Rovshan is on the run after killing the Tybalt character, and a vigilant policeman fatally wounds him when he approaches the hospital where Jamilya is treated after faking a suicide attempt.

Comedy fans flocked to a rare Uzbek film with a happy ending — Rustam Sagdiev’s Pushy Daughter-in-Law.

In the film, a chic big-city girl falls for a student from a parochial hamlet, where Muslim values are strong and tank tops on women are frowned upon. The student rejects her charms and returns home after graduation, but the girl shows up at his doorstep — only to enrage his strict mother with improper outfits and reluctance to tend cows.

The rest is also Shakespearean — the taming of the shrew ends with a wedding feast.

At least 30 films have been made in Uzbekistan in 2006, said TV-film producer Ruben Arzumanov — compared to 20 in 2005 and a handful for most of the chaotic 1990s that followed the 1991 Soviet breakup.

The boom began in the wake of a flop.

Tamerlane, a government-sponsored epic about a medieval Muslim conqueror now lauded as the founding father of the Uzbek state, took years to produce and cost millions of dollars — only to fail at the box-office after its 2003 release.

The failure marked the collapse of Uzbekfilm, a state-run film studio founded in 1925 by the Soviet government eager to promote Communist ideology among Muslims of Central Asia.

Now a new generation of film directors — has emerged. Equipped with digital cameras (often rented) and Adobe software (always pirated), they don’t need expensive celluloid film and editing facilities.

“All of a sudden, everyone’s got a talent to make movies,” said Bakhodir Yuldashev, one of the founders of Markaz TV, Uzbek music television. “They are after easy money, not art.” But these commercial movies are the only chance to resurrect the Uzbek film industry, Korobkin said.

Most of the Uzbek hits have been made for US$30,000 to 50,000, and earned three to five times as much.

The profits seem astounding for a country with an average monthly income of less than US$50, where copyright piracy is ubiquitous, and where most of the box-office revenues come from just a handful of cinemas in Tashkent.

It takes about two or three months to make a movie. Locations are few, and characters are easily recognisable.

“The good guy must always be good, and the bad guy real bad,” said Ruslan Yarullin, a cinematographer and film editor. “Folks like love stories with twisty plots, discotheques, rapes and murders.”