A documentary about revered filmmaker James Ivory is part of an eclectic slate from New York’s Min(d) Studio, it was announced on the sidelines of the Asia TV Forum and Market in Singapore.
The boutique studio, the brainchild of Dev Benegal (New York City), Maya Patel (London and Hong Kong) and Neeraj Jain (Los Angeles), came together during the pandemic with a shared vision to tell stories about people and cultures that are often unheard and unseen. Benegal is the acclaimed director of “English, August”, “Split Wide Open” and “Road, Movie”.
The slate kicks off with “Ink & Ivory”, a film about director James Ivory (one half of the famed Merchant-Ivory partnership and Academy Award winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for “Call Me By Your Name”) and his vision for an exhibition of his selected works at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, scheduled for summer 2024.
The feature film “Further to Fly”, based on a short story by Meera Nair, will tell the story of an immigrant woman in Jackson Heights, New York, who believes her upstairs neighbour is an angel. The project was an official selection of the 2022 PGA Create Fellowship. Freida Pinto and Emily Verellen Strom of Freebird Films are on board as executive producers.
Based on the novel “Moon Goddess” by Niti Sampat Patel, “The Violet Hour” is a ghost story that follows three young women across generations in the mystical deserts of Kutch, India.
The feature film “A Love Supreme”, an official selection of the Film Bazaar co-production market at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa 2023, is a turbulent love story of an actor and a director who stage the classic play “Shakuntala” and set out to find the elusive woman lost to time.
The limited edition series “Risk”, based on the book “Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention of Modern Photojournalism” by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos, is inspired by and based on the story of photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. In the series, a couple fall in love and risk everything to wake up the world. Together they change the way stories are told through images. Taro went on to become a pioneering war photographer. Capa went on to become one of the greatest photographers of our time.
Benegal said: “Our stories exist at the intersection of the intelligent and the commercial. It’s a balancing act. And we want to walk that tightrope”.
Patel added: “While we are committed to stories that can spark conversation outside the walls of the cinema, we also want people to feel entertained and connected.
Jain said: “The three of us have found such a beautiful synergy in working together and the stories we want to tell. We work on the premise that cinema is meant to be experienced on a big screen. Our vision is big, our stories are immersive.
