Bollywood broke new ground last week with the release of the first international movie filmed in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Kabul Express, a tale of two Indian journalists out of their depth on the trail of Taliban, is set among the country's spectacularly scarred landscape of gutted buildings and pitted flatlands.

Starring two of Bollywood's most marketable men, model-turned-screen star John Abraham and comedian Arshad Warsi, as well as American, Afghan and Pakistani actors, with a million-dollar production budget, Kabul Express has been screened at high-profile film festivals in Toronto and Dubai.

Shot over 45 days in and around Kabul, the Bombay film crew arrived in September last year during the resurgence of Taliban violence that saw three suicide bombings and the beheading of an Indian construction engineer.

Although Hindi movies are very popular in Afghanistan, Bollywood's joie de vivre did not appeal to the Taliban's austere moral code and the Islamic government banned the films.

The film's director and writer, Kabir Khan says that it took just two weeks before the Taliban sent death threats to the movie set. "I was told by the Indian ambassador in Kabul that there was a five-man death squad sent by the Taliban. Everybody was pretty nervous.

The Taliban wanted to send a message that you cannot have a normal life here. But the Afghan government really helped. They gave us 60 armed commandos and we used to roll around in 35 SUVs. In fact we looked like a militia."

Khan, a documentary filmmaker from Delhi who first visited Afghanistan in 1996 and has been back half a dozen times since, said Kabul Express was a departure for Bollywood. Not only is it just one and half hours long, but the film also contains no song-and-dance sequences.

"Mumbai studios are looking for new stories and new ways to tell them. This is a movie shot in Afghanistan, about Afghanistan. You know Hindi cinema goes to New York or London but the plot is not concerned with issues relating to America or London. Instead the film is about Indians. Kabul Express is as much about the Afghan people."

Although Kabul Express has been much hyped in India and the movie's director says it got a warm reception in foreign film festivals, some western critics have panned it.

"Treating the ongoing struggles in Afghanistan with crude indecision and larky silliness, Kabul Express at once lamely revives buddy road pics and trivialises global politics," said Daily Variety, the bible of the US film industry.

Whatever the west thinks, Bollywood still reigns supreme in Afghanistan. Hanif Hum Ghum, the Afghan actor who plays the journalists' guide, told Indian reporters it was his childhood dream to act in "Hindi cinema" and Afghanistan's favourite actor is Bollywood's leading man Shah Rukh Khan.

The last Indian film shot in the country was Khuda Gawah (God's Witness), in 1982. However, the Taliban's arrival saw theatres in Afghanistan shut down and some turned into mosques. Actors fled abroad or gave up working.

Since the Taliban were ousted there has been a cinematic renaissance. The local film industry got a big fillip when the movie Osama won the Golden Globe Award in 2003 for best foreign film.

Indian-Afghan ties have also been on a high since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Delhi is one of the country's biggest donors, with an aid budget of $650m, and Indian companies are rebuilding roads and schools.

Prof Kaleem Bahadur, an expert on Indo-Afghan relations, said: "Indians are fascinated by Afghanistan. It is a romanticism that is similar to the frontier sentimentality that you would have found in the US of the 19th century. It explains the fascination around Kabul Express."