Netflix’s Best of the Best centers two South Asian American best friends at UCLA and stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia, who say the film acts as a spiritual successor to Bend It Like Beckham and celebrates collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance.
The film follows Maya (Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Kedia) as they join UCLA’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team and navigate friendship, competition, and college life — a premise described in Teen Vogue’s set visit reporting and in an interview with the actresses on Netflix’s Tudum.
Both outlets report the project was made with a strong focus on authentic dance culture: Tudum notes co-writers Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam wrote the story, and Teen Vogue traces the film’s roots to the North American South Asian collegiate dance scene and the Best of the Best competition that inspired the title.
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is quoted in Teen Vogue saying she believes the movie “is gonna hit people all over the globe” because of its storytelling, and Teen Vogue reports Gurinder Chadha, director of Bend It Like Beckham, visited the set during filming — a connection the cast and crew used to describe the film’s lineage.
On Tudum, the leads described an intense preparation period: the actors completed a months-long dance “boot camp,” training up to 14-hour days in Los Angeles studios and learning choreography from Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman so the leads could perform believable, technically demanding routines on screen.
Both outlets emphasize that dance serves the story rather than defining it: Ramakrishnan told Tudum that “dance is the vehicle to bring people into the story,” while Teen Vogue highlights the film’s center on a decades-long friendship and the specific cultural experience of Desi college dancers.
Director Lena Khan leads a cast that mixes professional dancers and actors, and Tudum credits choreographers and the production’s collaborative rehearsal environment for the film’s energetic finale sequences. For further reading on Khan’s approach to the movie, see Lena Khan on ‘Best of the Best’ — making a Bollywood-fusion dance film for Netflix.
Best of the Best is streaming on Netflix; reviewers and feature pieces frame it as both a dance film and a friendship story with an explicitly South Asian American perspective, and the cast and creative team publicly connected it to Bend It Like Beckham during press coverage.
Sources
- Teen Vogue — set visit reporting, quotes from Ramakrishnan and Kedia, and note that Gurinder Chadha visited the set.
- Netflix Tudum — interview with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia on dance training, co-writers, choreographers, and production details.
- Netflix — official title page confirming film synopsis and streaming availability.
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