Movies
Marathi film Narbachi Waadi to compete at the 12th PIFF
Mumbai: Marathi film Narbachi Waadi produced by Film Farm that received enormous critical acclaim and was a box office success, has been officially selected to compete at the upcoming 12th Pune International Film Festival (PIFF).
The film is an adaption of the famous play, Shajjano Bagan by Manoj Mitra. The movie stars Dilip Prabhavalkar, Manoj Joshi, Kishori Shahane and is directed by Aditya Sarpotdar. The movie will be screened under the Marathi Feature Film competition section. Only seven movies have been selected in the Marathi feature competition.
Talking about the selection of the movie at PIFF an elated Film Farm co-founder Kalyan Guha, said, “It’s a great honour for us as our first major Marathi feature film has been selected for screening at the prestigious Pune International Film Festival. It has been our endeavour to offer world class content in various fields of media and we will continue to do so.”
The movie Narbachi Waadi, narrates the story of Narba, a simple man living in his wadi in Konkan and his struggle to reclaim his beloved piece of property. A gift from his ancestors, Narba nurtures this grove with love. One day a greedy landlord Rangarao eyes it and wants the wadi by hook or crook. But circumstances ensure that the Zamindar doesn’t get the land and he dies out of disappointment. Years later, his son tries fulfilling his late father’s wish of owning Narbachi Wadi.
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.
