Hindi
Ketan Mehta’s Rang Rasiya wins top audience award at London Indian Film Fest
MUMBAI: After audiences voted for their favourite two films across 28 screenings from 30 June to 12 July, the second London Indian Film Festival has announced winners of the Audience award.
Topping the list among the favourites was Ketan Mehta‘s Rang Rasiya (Colours Of Passion), which won the top Audience Award. The film charts the life of Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma. Commented Mehta, “I am thrilled that my passion project has won the coveted audience award at the Festival. The premiere in the historic surroundings of the Victoria & Albert Museum was wonderful and the interaction with London audiences was great. This award is the icing on the cake.”
The Satyajit Ray Foundation‘s Short Film Award for the year was bagged by Andrew Hinton‘s Amar – a lucid, unsentimental and short documentary about a day in the life of a poor city kid, rising in the dark, working two jobs before school and going back to one of them after.
Receiving the award, Hinton said that he would share his ?1,000 prize money with the young lad who essayed the role of the protagonist.
Said festival director Cary Sawhney, “It‘s been an amazing year for us, in spite of the recession, many people have got behind our festival and really made it work, including our internationally known team. In just two years, we are pleased to have brought to London some of India‘s top talent, including the World Premiere of Delhi Belly from the Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan stable, which has become a global hit; to sold out Q&As with leading independent directors like Anurag Kashyap, Rituparno Ghosh and Ketan Mehta at some of London‘s top venues.”
The festival also hosted the UK premiere of Anurag Kashyap‘s That Girl In Yellow Boots, Memories in March and Aarekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story).
The festival opened with the world premiere of Aamir Khan Productions and UTV Motion Pictures‘ Delhi Belly and ended with the UK premiere of Srijit Mukherji‘s Autograph.
Hindi
Jio Studios unveils AI-powered Krishna teaser at NAB Show 2026
Global first look of Krishna uses Galleri5 AI pipeline on Azure, Historyverse slate as Jio’s Dhurandhar crosses Rs 3,000cr worldwide.
MUMBAI: Krishna has just dropped a divine teaser and this time the gods are powered by silicon, not just scripture. Jio Studios and Collective Studios’ Historyverse stole the spotlight at the NAB Show 2026 in Las Vegas with the world’s first teaser for their upcoming theatrical feature Krishna, directed by Manu Anand. The big reveal happened during Microsoft’s keynote “Powering Intelligent Media, From AI Experimentation to Real-World Impact,” where the film’s AI-native production pipeline took centre stage alongside Collective Artists Network’s in-house platform, Galleri5.
At the heart of this mythological spectacle lies a fresh cinematic workflow built by Galleri5 on Microsoft Azure’s advanced AI and cloud infrastructure. Forget bolting AI onto traditional VFX or animation, this is an end-to-end, production-grade system woven into every layer: world-building, character creation, shot design and final output. Yet the storytelling remains firmly director-led, emphasising emotional depth, stillness, music and performance rather than pure spectacle. The result? Large-format theatrical cinema rooted in Indian history and culture, but conceived in ways that were simply not possible before.
Collective Artists Network runs Galleri5 natively on Azure, leveraging Microsoft Foundry and cutting-edge AI tools to handle film, episodic and advertising workflows in a secure enterprise environment. Microsoft highlighted Collective as a “Frontier” organisation successfully moving AI from pilot projects to real production-scale deployment in cinema. The technology is also on display at Microsoft’s NAB booth in the West Hall (Booth W1731).
Jio Studios (Media & Content Business, Reliance Industries), president Jyoti Deshpande said the project advances the studio’s mission to take Indian stories global with scale, ambition and authenticity, “With Krishna, we are embracing cutting-edge AI-led filmmaking while democratising these tools to make them more accessible, intuitive and cost-effective for storytellers everywhere.”
Collective Artists Network founder & group CEO Vijay Subramaniam added, “We’re using technology developed in India to carry our culture and history to audiences worldwide at a scale never seen before.”
Microsoft, vice president for telco media & entertainment, gaming Silvia Candiani noted that the media industry has reached an inflection point, “AI is no longer about experimentation but delivering real impact at production scale… By building AI-native creative systems on Microsoft Azure, Collective exemplifies how storytellers can unlock new formats, move faster and realise a true return on intelligence while keeping human creativity at the centre.”
Krishna forms part of Historyverse, Collective Studios’ ambitious slate of history and culture-driven IPs. The slate draws from iconic figures and traditions that shaped the Indian subcontinent, including stories inspired by Kali, Karna and Durga. It builds on the already-released Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh series, showing how ancient narratives can be reimagined for modern screens.
Jio Studios, India’s leading content studio and the media and content arm of Reliance Industries, continues its blockbuster run. The studio’s Dhurandhar franchise led by Dhurandhar and Dhurandhar: The Revenge has become the first Indian film series to cross Rs 3,000 crore worldwide. It also delivered three consecutive years of India’s highest-grossing Hindi films: Stree 2 (2024), Dhurandhar (2025) and Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026). In just eight years, Jio Studios has assembled a library of over 160 films and series, with more than 60 titles winning over 500 awards. Other notable successes include Laapataa Ladies (India’s official Oscar entry 2025), Stree, Article 370, Shaitaan and Mrs.
The NAB unveiling marks another step in Jio Studios and Collective’s push to blend Indian storytelling talent with frontier technology proving that the future of cinema may well be both ancient in spirit and thoroughly modern in execution. For audiences who love epic tales with a fresh twist, Krishna promises to deliver divine drama, this time with a little help from the cloud.
