Hollywood
‘Kajarya’ makes it to Montreal World Film Festival
MUMBAI: Independent film ‘Kajarya’, has been selected for the prestigious Montreal Film Festival 2014.
Directed by Madhureeta Anand, the film will be showcased in the ‘Focus on World Cinema’ section at the Montreal World Film Festival 2014, 21 August – 1 September.
An assured second feature from the director, the film is an original voice about female foeticide in India. It is a story of a rookie journalist in Delhi who exposes a woman, believed to embody Goddess Kali, who ritually kills female newborns in a village nearby. The story questions notions of women’s emancipation and feminism as it weaves through an interplay of drama and events and explores how India continues to live in many centuries at the same time.
‘Kajarya’ stars Meenu Hooda, Ridhima Sud and Kuldeep Ruhil. The film had its world premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival. It has found critical appreciation internationally since and has been selected by the Forbes India magazine as the #1 in the Top 5 Films to See in 2014.
The movie is produced by Starfire Movies and co-produced by Ekaa Films and Overdose Joint.
Starfire’s next co-production is ‘Ludo’, with Idyabooster and Overdose Joint. ‘Ludo’ is a fantasy-thriller horror film by the maverick directors duo Q and Nikon, and is currently in post production.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
