SGIFF: India’s Anurag Kashyap Reveals ‘Project 10’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Naman Ramachandran

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Prolific Indian auteur Anurag Kashyap (“Gangs Of Wasseypur”) is working on a raft of projects across formats. Kashyap was head of the jury for the Asian feature film competition at the Singapore International Film Festival this year.

Set in the U.K. and India, is a film currently identified as “Project 10,” that Kashyap describes as a “young love story” meant for theatrical release, starring several newcomers. Kashyap shot the U.K. leg of the film this summer. Good Bad Films, the company Kashyap recently co-founded with Dhruv Jagasia and Akshay Thakkar, will produce. The cast of “Project 10” includes Alaia F, who is due to make her debut with Nitin Kakkar’s “Jawani Janeman”, another U.K.-set project, co-starring Saif Ali Khan (“Sacred Games”).

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The filmmaker’s ongoing relationship with Netflix will continue with the feature film “Choked,” currently in post. “It is again a love story set against some happenings that have occurred in India,” says Kashyap. “It is a love story in a marriage – 10 years in a marriage when the husband and wife fall back in love again.”

Kashyap’s segment of Netflix anthology film “Ghost Stories” is due to stream from Jan. 1, 2020. “It is creepy and eerie and it deals with a lot of trauma that people associate with pregnancy and all the fears and anxiety around it, and of miscarriage,” Kashyap told Variety.

In 2013, producer Ashi Dua brought together Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar (“Gully Boy”), Karan Johar (“Student Of The Year”) and Dibakar Banerjee (“Shanghai”) to direct segments of anthology film “Bombay Talkies,” and continued the format with the same directors in 2018 Netflix film “Lust Stories”. “Ghost Stories” reunites the four filmmakers.

Kashyap also directed several episodes of Netflix’s “Sacred Games” for which he won best fiction director at Singapore’s Asian Academy Creative Awards in 2018. The series was nominated for best drama at the recently concluded International Emmy Awards. At the awards, “Lust Stories” scored a nomination in the TV Movie/Mini-Series category, and Radhika Apte a best actress nomination for her performance in Kashyap’s segment of the film.

Apart from these, Kashyap is developing Suketu Mehta’s book “Maximum City” as a series for Ashok Amritraj’s Hyde Park Entertainment.

Kashyap is delighted with the effect that the streaming boom has had on India. “OTT has changed everything, it has equalised things, for actors, writers, filmmakers,” says Kashyap. “Anybody who looks at it as an opportunity to create, they will thrive. All of those who look at it purely as a money making venture, won’t. That differentiation will happen and things will filter out. Platforms also after a while will begin caring about what they are putting out and what works.”

The filmmaker also praised the quality of the competing films at SGIFF. “The selection was really good. The films that have won, and the films that manage to surprise, were really something.”

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