India is noted for its Hindi cinema, based in Bombay, but regional film industries are also thriving.

BBC Correspondent Daniel Lak reports on the qualities of Keralan cinema

They like to lay it on thick in Malayalam films with all the classic ingredients of popular Indian cinema - graphic violence, love interest and songs.

But movies made in Kerala have to have something else - a social conscience.

On the set of Red Flag, a movie about communists in Kerala, the filmmakers are mixing entertainment with Marxism, in India's most left wing state.

The film closes with the socialist symbol, the red flag triumphing in a rather grisly manner.

Mamooty : "Our films deal with more social, cultural and political subjects"

"We deal with more social, cultural and political subjects and our films are more down to earth, more real.

"We deal with more subjects with human relations and emotions, " said Mamooty, star of the Malayalam films.

Budgets are low but audiences are fiercely loyal.

According to the Indian star Kushboo, India's larger Hindi film industry looks south for both plots and inspiration.

"I think we are technically ahead of the Bollywood Hindi films and scriptwise because most of the Hindi films you see are remakes of the South Indian films

"Very rarely you will come across a South Indian film being a remake of a Hindi film."

The unique nature of films made in Kerala is directly linked to the state's high literacy rate.

Most children learn to read at free government schools which are a legacy of decades of communist rule.

Keralans are great writers too with more novels being published here than anywhere else in India.

Setting the scene

The dreamy tropical landscape - more water than land in places - is the perfect backdrop both for films and for a quality of life for the common citizen unparalleled elsewhere in the country.

Whatever successes Kerala's social reformers have had, there are still many serious problems.

Real poverty may not be as acute as elsewhere in the country, but it certainly exists.

This is India's most crowded state, even land reclaimed from rivers in the sea is used by needy families.

For filmmakers there are still a lot of real issues to put on the big screen.

Film posters hang from the trees like fruit

To advertise some of the 80-odd Malayalam language movies made here every year, film posters hang from the trees like fruit.

Keralan films are efficient too. The whole of Red Flag was shot in less than a month and will be in the cinema next year.