A big Bollywood venture next for Dheer Momaya!

When we call Dheer Momaya expecting him to tell us a bit about the projects his production house Jugaad Motion Pictures (along with Sakshi Khanna and Ukranian filmmaker Daria Ghai) is backing, we are flabbergasted with the amount of work they are up to! “I hardly sleep,” laughs Dheer, adding, “I hope it continues like this, so we can bring out stuff that we really want to put out there.” With two of his movies bagging awards at international film festivals, we talk to the young producer about the kind of stories that he wants to tell...

How is the festival circuit treating your first two films — Teen Aur Aadha and Namdev Bhau?

Teen Aur Aadha went to 40 film festivals and won plenty of awards. We have sold it to an international streaming platform. Namdev Bhau got slightly more recognition internationally because it opened at Busan International Film Festival, followed by the BFI London Film Festival and had its US premiere at Palm Springs International Film Festival. We are releasing it in over 50 countries. There is a massive market for our movies in cinemas internationally.  People are connecting to the kind of projects that we are making. It’s mainly the non-Indian diaspora that is watching our films.

Are there any plans for an out-and-out Bollywood film?

Yes, we are looking to mount our first Bollywood film. It will be titled Chhote Kapde and will be on the lines of a Bareilly Ki Barfi or a Shubh Mangal Saavdhan. It will have all the commercial elements, the song-and-dance routine, the heightened sense of drama and emotion, comedy, family set-up, etc. We are quite excited about that and looking at casting a fairly-known star. Hopefully, it should go on the floors post monsoon this year. It will be directed by Dar (Daria) and we are looking at an early 2020 release.

A still from Teen Aur Aadha

What else is in the pipeline?

We are associating with filmmaker Pan Nalin for a Gujarati film called The Last Show. It’s autobiographical in a way. We also want to do a drama series this year and are in talks with a couple of producers in America for the same. The show will be called Brothel Assassins and directed by Dar. It’s set in a brothel in old Bombay that has a code of its own. Any man who goes there is assassinated by the woman he sleeps with. It’s a neo-noir crime drama that unfolds over a couple of seasons. For the Indian online streaming space, we are making a family drama about a group of seven children who stay in a home for orphans. It’s a quirky and funny family story.

We hear that yours is one of the 10 projects selected out of 4,500 applicants for the Berlinale Talent Project Market. Tell us about that.

Yes, six years after The Lunchbox, our project In Laws has been selected here. We are in the process of locking a French, German and Dutch co-producers for the film. If that happens, then we might accelerate that project and make it before our drama series.

What are the kind of stories that Jugaad wants to put out there?

We want to make larger and wider audience format films, which is why we are taking advice from a lot of people in the industry. We want to make the characters relatable. Today, everyone wants to create content. A year from now, there will be serious quality checks and the audience will look away from content that doesn’t strike a chord. That’s going to leave a few of us who came in with a passion to tell stories. That’s a very important distinction to make. We want to align ourselves with making wider-format content but want to be boutique in nature and make stories that resonate with us.

A still from Namdev Bhau