Maitreyi Ramakrishnan spent months training for best of the best Netflix before Friday’s premiere, after landing a role that required her to enter competitive dance for the first time. Lena Khan’s film puts that pressure at the center of a Bollywood fusion story built around a run to the U.S. Championship.
Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam wrote the script, drawing on their own experience in similar circuits growing up. Khan made the movie after spending time with UCLA’s dance team and traveling to North Carolina to observe competitions, a practical step that fits the production’s need to treat the dance floor like a sporting bracket, not a backdrop.
Lena Khan on the floor
Khan said the cast had to be pushed past performance into athletic precision. She told Ramakrishnan, "I need you to give me some Channing Tatum energy," then escalated the note to, "no, actually, I need you to do a Christian Bale on me. I need a complete athletic transformation." That kind of direction matters in a film where the movement has to carry plot, character, and competition at once.
Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman built the dance sequences, with Joya Kazi credited as co-choreographer. Khan said, "What is the essence we are trying to bring out in this particular moment?" That approach kept the choreography from reading like a generic montage and instead made each number serve the rivalry, the nerves, and the climb toward the U.S. Championship.
South Asian campus edge
Competitive Bollywood has thrived on American college campuses for decades, but it has rarely been the subject of a scripted feature film. Khan addressed that gap bluntly: "We have so much respect for the skill sets of other cultures. We’re looking at kung fu, we’re looking at these different arts. But when we look at our own, we’re used to seeing ourselves as Apu or as the funny nerdy side characters," she said.
She added, "We can be proud of things that we do as South Asians," which is the movie’s real point of difference. The film’s framing gives South Asian competitive dance the same narrative weight other screen sports usually get, and that should make it travel beyond the campus niche that inspired it.
One-day dance shoots
Typical Bollywood dance sequences get five days to shoot, but this production often had just one. The tighter schedule puts more pressure on the choreography and the performers, especially in a film that mixes Kuthu, Bharatanatyam and Pakistani-influenced dance inside a competition story.
Khan also recalled a reaction that captures how unfamiliar the subject still is: "Bollywood competitions, really?" That disbelief is exactly why the film is worth the Friday release on Netflix — not because it repeats a known formula, but because it puts a little-seen competitive world at the center of a feature and asks viewers to take it seriously.
