Hindi
‘Twosome’ picks up Hubert Bals award at Film Bazaar
MUMBAI: Siddharth Sinha‘s film Twosome was awarded with the Hubert Bals award for most promising feature film project at the close of the three-day networking and project meetings at India‘s Film Bazaar held from 24 to 26 November.
Written and to be directed by Sinha, Twosome is a story of two women – one a single working mother fighting to keep her apartment, and the other a young woman who falls in love with a pimp.
The project has been produced by Paris-based production house, Trompe Le Monde.
Sinha was one of the 10 Indian filmmakers who had projects selected for the main section of Film Bazaar, an event organised by India‘s National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).
His project, along with four others like Onir‘s I Am, Ben Rekhi‘s Keep Off The Grass and Sandeep Varma‘s Manjunath have been selected to take part in next year‘s Cinemart.
The NFDC will support the producers of all four projects to attend the Rotterdam film festival‘s projects market in January.
In addition to the financing side of Film Bazaar, six projects took part in Screenwriters‘ Lab, four were analysed in a Work-In-Progress Lab while five Indian and an equal number of European projects were part at the Media programme-backed initiative Primexchange.
All this activity, in addition to a series of presentations and seminars, resulted in a
Film Bazaar is held during the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), which this year opened with Chinese director He Ping‘s Wheat on 23 November and goes on up to 3 December, with Pedro Almodovar‘s Broken Embraces being the closing film.
Hindi
Jio Studios, Sanjay Dutt team up to revive Khal Nayak
Rights acquired for new version, format under wraps as remake plans take shape.
MUMBAI: The villain is back and this time, he’s rewriting his own script. Jio Studios has partnered with Three Dimension Motion Pictures and Aspect Entertainment to revive the 1993 cult classic Khal Nayak, marking a fresh chapter for one of Bollywood’s most iconic anti-hero stories. The original film, directed by Subhash Ghai under Mukta Arts, was a commercial and cultural milestone, with Sanjay Dutt’s portrayal of Ballu becoming one of Hindi cinema’s most memorable performances.
Dutt, along with Aksha Kamboj, has now acquired the rights from the original creators, bringing on board Jio Studios and its President Jyoti Deshpande to steer the project creatively.
While the exact format whether remake, sequel, prequel, or a completely new narrative remains undisclosed, the collaboration aims to reinterpret the story for contemporary audiences while retaining the essence that made the original a defining film of the 1990s.
The move taps into a broader industry trend of reviving legacy intellectual property, particularly characters with strong recall value. “Khal Nayak” was notable for pushing mainstream Hindi cinema into morally grey territory at a time when heroes were largely one-dimensional, making Ballu’s character a standout.
The project also marks the film production debut of Aspect Entertainment, signalling a push towards more technology-led storytelling frameworks. Meanwhile, Jio Studios continues to expand its slate, having built a library of over 200 films and series, with more than 60 titles collectively winning 500-plus awards.
For Dutt, the revival is as much personal as it is strategic, a return to a role that reshaped his career. For the industry, it is another sign that nostalgia, when paired with scale, remains a powerful box-office proposition.
Because in Bollywood, some villains never fade, they just wait for the perfect comeback.
