Having failed to attract a Bollywood movie to shoot in Ireland, three years after wooing the industry, the Irish Film Board is doing the next best thing. It has funded a home-grown all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood musical that will be shot on the streets of Dublin next weekend — and the public is being invited to take part.

The director of the short film is hoping the work, which involves a romantic sequence in the Botanic Gardens and a musical number on one of Dublin’s main shopping thoroughfares, will finally coax the real thing to Ireland.

“Bollywood crews haven’t really been coming here at all,” said David O’Sullivan, the film’s director. “They go to London and Switzerland all the time. They really need to start coming here and this is a way of showing that Bollywood fits in Ireland.”

O’Sullivan’s film, Street Masala, is about Baba, a male Indian convenience store worker, who falls in love with an Irish estate agent who works nearby but is out of his league.

The project is being shot on such a “minuscule” budget that the producers have asked Dubliners to take part in the obligatory final dance number, which will be shot on a city centre street. It is hoped that 150 shoppers will join in the Indian musical number, which has been written by Deco and Brez, members of Republic of Loose, the band that is supporting U2 on tour this year.

In January 2006, Bertie Ahern, the then taoiseach, and John O’Donoghue, the minister for arts and tourism, led a delegation to India where they met with senior Bollywood executives and asked them to consider Ireland as a filming location. Before the trip, a delegation of Indian journalists was flown to Ireland, greeted by the taoiseach and shown around Ardmore Studios and Wicklow.

The following March, 12 Bollywood movie producers were invited on a “familiarisation trip” by the film board and Tourism Ireland to meet Irish producers and view locations.

A previous visit in 2004 by the film board and Tourism Ireland to the Chenai region of India, which has a smaller film industry than Bollywood, succeeded in enticing about a dozen films to shoot scenes in Ireland. These tended to be low-budget productions, however. The aim is to lure a full feature film from the more affluent end of the Indian film production industry centred around Mumbai.

Bollywood produces about 1,000 films a year, outstripping Hollywood. Since the upsurge in hostilities in Kashmir, traditionally the favourite location for Bollywood films’ popular dream and fantasy sequences, Indian directors have been choosing western locations for mountains and valleys.

Switzerland, a favourite, has experienced a significant rise in Indian tourism as a result. The Irish government had been hoping for a similar boost but it has failed to materialise.

The Irish Film Board said: “What came out of [the trade mission] is that there are potential opportunities but at the moment their budgets are quite low. Our core markets continue to be the UK, US and Europe.”

O’Sullivan’s film is funded by the film board under its Short Shorts initiative, which encourages up-and-coming writers, directors and producers to make films on low budgets. A music video and commercials director, O’Sullivan won Best Short Film at Galway Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Cork International Film Festival for his 2006 short film Nun More Deadly.

Miriam Cahill of fishfilms, which is producing Street Masala, said would-be participants in the dance scene should log on to YouTube to learn it.

“People can learn the dance moves by clicking onto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcRn-WX7rCI and then sending us their details at dublinbollywood@gmail.com . We are looking for people of all ages and dance skills. What we lack in budget we promise to make up for in fun.”

The huge success of Slumdog Millionaire, at the box office and at the Oscars and the Baftas, has prompted Western producers to make more Indian-flavoured musicals.

The Irish Film Board hopes other foreign projects will shoot in Ireland following the European Commission’s approval of a new version of the film tax incentive last month. Leap Year, starring Amy Adams and which is filming in Dublin and around the country, is the first Hollywood production attracted by the scheme.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president