Film Fantasy

ICE PEOPLE: Ambika Hinduja

Ambika Hinduja

Twenty-something Ambika Hinduja is a little nervous. Her three-year-old production company, Serendipity Films, has got its first major release Being Cyrus coming up on March 24, 2006. Daughter of Ashok Hinduja, Ambika says, "I've been dying to make films ever since I was nine years old."

With Being Cyrus, a film cleverly sold as Saif Ali Khan's first English film, Hinduja is excited at the rave reviews it has already received from international film festivals such as South Asian Film Festival held in New York and the Indian Film Festival recently held in Israel.

"It was one big party with a fair amount of creative work thrown in for good measure," says the pretty Hinduja, who also assisted director Subhash Ghai in Yaadein and Farhan Akhtar in Lakshya. The films may have failed but Hinduja didn't lose heart and when she read the script of Being Cyrus, she knew, "This had to be my first film as a producer."

The production company she started with good friend Dinesh Vijan is now going on a director-signing- spree. "Commercial Hindi films do little to titillate me," she says, adding, "I'd like my cinema to first appeal to me and then to the rest of the audiences."

Though she doesn't want to delve into details, Hinduja says, "Our next film is a comic caper by a first-time director Kunal Shivdasani who has been a well-known ad filmmaker." Her company is also in talks with Rituparno Ghosh for a film that they wish to produce for him.

And what about the celluloid dream of making her own film? She laughs: "I have a rough idea and hopefully by the end of 2007, I'll make that dream a reality too."