Film City, Mumbai

Where it sits. Film City — officially Dadasaheb Phalke Chitranagari — spreads over roughly 520 acres in Goregaon East, in Mumbai's northern suburbs, hard against Aarey Colony and the boundary of Sanjay Gandhi National Park. That location explains its character. It is not a lot ringed by warehouses in a flat industrial estate; it is a valley of scrubby hills, artificial lakes and forest, with sets planted in the folds of it, and the forest is a real one. Leopard sightings on the roads inside the complex are routine, attacks are not unknown, and the boundary between studio land and national park has never been drawn with any clarity — a vagueness that has produced long-running allegations about fraudulent land sales in the surrounding area.

The story behind it. Bombay's film industry spent the mid-twentieth century working out of privately owned studios that were steadily being sold for redevelopment. Pressure from filmmakers — V. Shantaram, B. R. Chopra and Dilip Kumar prominent among them — persuaded the Maharashtra government to build a public facility, and Film City was established by the state's Department of Cultural Affairs on 26 September 1977, with Shantaram guiding the planning and execution. In 2001 it was renamed for Dadasaheb Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra in 1913 and is universally regarded as the founder of Indian cinema.

What is actually on the site. Sixteen sound stages and forty-two outdoor shooting locations, with permanent standing sets that cover the recurring needs of Hindi and Marathi production: temples, a courtroom, a prison, a police station, village streets, mansions, gardens and picnic grounds, plus artificial waterfalls, lakes and hillsides. The economics are straightforward — a courtroom scene shot on a permanent set costs a fraction of what it costs to dress a real one, and the same flight of steps has served as the entrance to a hundred different institutions. On an average day around 800 people are at work across roughly eight of the locations at once, and because television serials run continuously, some sets are effectively occupied year-round by the same production. Song sequences, award-show recordings, advertising shoots and reality television all share the ground with feature work.

On screen. Film City is the invisible location: not a place audiences recognise but the place a very large share of Hindi and Marathi screen output is physically made. Interiors that appear to be in Delhi, Lucknow or London are frequently built here; village exteriors standing in for Uttar Pradesh or rural Maharashtra are dressed on the same hillsides year after year. Long-running television — including the studio-built worlds of India's biggest reality formats — occupies purpose-built stages on the site. Anyone who wants to understand how Indian popular cinema is assembled learns more here in two hours than in a week of location-hunting around the city, precisely because the illusion is visible from the back: the temple with no roof, the mansion facade with scaffolding behind it, the lake with a pump house at one end.

What a visitor can realistically do. The Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation introduced guided tours in 2014, priced at around ₹650, and they remain the only straightforward way in. The tour runs by coach through the outdoor sets, stops at a few standing locations, and usually includes a demonstration of basic production technique; whether you see live shooting is entirely a matter of luck and of what the productions in residence permit that day. Independent visitors cannot simply drive in — the gate is controlled, and access without a booking or a production pass is not granted. Photography rules vary by set and are enforced. Take the leopard warnings seriously as well: the animals move between the national park and the studio grounds along the same internal roads the coaches use, and the guidance about not walking alone at dusk is not theatre. The adjacent Aarey forest has been the subject of one of Mumbai's fiercest environmental fights, over the felling of trees for a metro car shed, and the argument runs right up to Film City's fence line.

Getting there and timing. Goregaon station on the Western line is the nearest railhead, about six kilometres away, with autorickshaws covering the last stretch to the main gate on Film City Road; the Western Express Highway is the road approach from south Mumbai and takes an hour or more in traffic. Weekdays are when the place is working and therefore worth seeing; weekends are quieter on set. November to February gives the best conditions, since much of the tour is outdoors on unshaded hillsides and May is punishing. During the June to September monsoon the outdoor sets are often unusable and the internal roads flood. Book the tour in advance through MTDC rather than turning up at the gate.