‘Indian Matchmaking’ Firm Meralta Films Hires ‘Evil Eye’ Producer Nina Anand Aujla & Maya Gnyp

Jesse Whittock
·3 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Meralta Films, the Mumbai-based co-producer behind Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking, has hired Nina Anand Aujla and Maya Gnyp to supercharge its LA division.

Meralta, also known for Shelter, a DGA-winning episode of HBO Max’s Through Our Eyes, and Mundhra’s Academy Award-nominated short doc St. Louis Superman, focuses on premium content that brings South Asian representation into the mainstream. It will now seek to achieve goal that in Hollywood.

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Aujla will be Head of Film and Television and Gnyp Vice President, Production at the firm, which is self-funded.

Aujla most recently produced Amazon Studios and Blumhouse Productions horror feature Evil Eye and before that helped to launch Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s Purple Pebble Pictures banner in the US and went on to work on various film and TV projects, including the Untitled Mindy Kaling/Priyanka Chopra Project for Universal Pictures. She also worked at Barry Jenkins’s Pastel on Under the Silver Lake and The Girlfriend Experience season two and with Scott Stuber’s Bluegrass Films (Patriot’s Day, Ted 2, Little Evil).

Gnyp is know for several films, the most recent of which was 2019’s Mystify: Michael Hutchence, which premiered at Tribeca and screened at 30+ festivals globally. Her other credits include Finding the Field (2019), biographies such as Ecco Homo (2015) and In Bob We Trust (2013), which was one of Australia’s highest grossing documentaries. She also worked on Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard (2011) and has worked in Australia, the UK, India, Spain and the U.S.

Meralta is in development with multiple unscripted and scripted projects for Apple+, HBO Max, Netflix and others. Upcoming projects include a second season of Netflix reality series Indian Matchmaking, which is co-produced with Sony Pictures Television’s The Intellectual Property Company and in which singles eschew dating apps and hand over their love lives to a traditional Mumbai-based matchmaker. It debuts in August, with a third season following. Company founder Mundhra also directed an episode of Brie Larson-produced documentary series Growing Up for Disney+ and two episodes of Netflix’s Never Have I Ever season three.

Mundhra’s directorial debut, feature doc A Suitable Girl, premiered in competition at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, where it was awarded the Albert Maysles Best Documentary Director prize. She also executive produced the feature documentary 1232 KM, on the exodus of migrant workers from India’s major cities following the government’s tough coronavirus lockdown.

“I started Meralta Films for two reasons: to tell groundbreaking, conversation-starting, highly entertaining stories from the perspective of the global majority, and to change the way our industry works for people of color,” she said. “Our dynamic team, who all happen to be women, has built a dynamic slate of fiction and non-fiction content with the best talent and partners in the business. We are excited to share the first few of these projects in the coming months.”

The LA office, which opened in 2020, brought the LA-born Mundhra full circle: her father Jag was a Bollywood filmmaker who ran the first Hindi-speaking theatre in the city — the Meralta Theatre in Culver City.

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