Priyanka Chopra channeled her grief into making Mary Kom

For a foreign film, the Toronto International Film Festival is a dreamy launching pad, so Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra was all smiles Thursday.

After all, her “small baby movie” Mary Kom had its international premiere in one of her “favourite” cities, on the festival’s opening night.

“The culture of India, I feel, is so tremendously interesting that it’s pulling a lot more of an audience . . . globally it’s opening up,” Chopra said during a press conference for the film at TIFF Bell Lightbox Thursday. “So it was a conscious decision . . . to come to TIFF.”

Mary Kom is a biopic about the life of a World Boxing Champ and Olympic bronze medallist who grew up the daughter of a rice farmer in India, and faced discrimination in her bid to box.

It was “literally . . . a lot of blood, sweat and tears for me,” said Chopra, who had to transform herself mentally and physically into a boxer, with a laugh.

And in a country where cricket is the sport and movies about athletes — let alone female athletes — were previously unheard of, Chopra is hoping the film will help usher in a few changes for actresses in India.

“Female films in India sometimes don’t get as much as the boys do,” she said. “If (Mary Kom) ends up, you know, breaking those barriers, I think it’ll change a lot of things for female actresses. I’m hoping for that and we’ve done our best.”

For Chopra, her “best” meant channelling all her grief from the death of her father four days before shooting started into the film’s production.

“This film is very personal to me,” she said. “I should have taken six months off and then trained for a movie and not done so many things, but I was committed . . . so every night I used to say, ‘I don’t think I can do this’ . . . and then in the morning I’d wake up and say, ‘hey, why not.’”

Mary Kom is the first feature film from director Omung Kumar, who also spoke alongside Chopra at TIFF Thursday, praising the actress’s commitment to the film.

“She’s so finicky,” Kumar said of the attention to detail Chopra paid to shooting each individual scene. “She’s so dedicated.”

Kumar said he was drawn to the movie because he wanted “a story which India would take notice of,” which made a biopic a seemingly good fit.

“I wanted to make something concrete,” he said. “Something I’m proud of instead of making a love story.”

And when the real Mary Kom saw the film, Chopra said she cried and cried and then Chopra cried and “we all cried.”

“She calls it her photo album,” Chopra said.

“It’s all real,” Kumar assured — even the scenes where Chopra takes a punch.

But “no spoilers,” Chopra said.

Neither Kumar nor Chopra are advocating for a whole slew of new Indian sports films, but both are hoping the film at least widens the variety that are produced and commercially successful in the country.

To “open up doors for people to experiment at least,” Kumar said.