Recently, Netflix India’s Lust Stories and Sacred Games went on to make us super proud with their International Emmy Award nominations. While Sacred Games was nominated under the Best Drama Series category, Radhika Apte bagged a nomination for her role in the anthology – Lust Stories. It’s great to see such amazing and original content being created in our country and it being recognised on a global scale, right? We caught up with one such person who was instrumental in this feat – the producer of Lust Stories – Ashi Dua. Founder of the production house, Flying Unicorn Entertainment, she has produced another similar anthology called Bombay Talkies, and films like Kaalakaandi and Ghazi Attack. Extremely elated about the nomination, she said that the OTT platform — Netflix — helped them reach out to the right audiences, and now the Emmy’s.
Elaborating, she says:
Bombay Talkies was a theatrical release and was similar to Lust Stories, but our country is wide, and sometimes stories get lost. But with Lust Stories, it found it’s home in an OTT platform like Netflix because our target audience was in a space like this.
Surely, a platform like this is of great relevance to people creating original content and she stresses on the fact that it is, in fact, the best time to be in the business where if your content has merit, you stand a chance. She adds, “I think its a fair and good time to be here, especially for people like us who are not from the industry and are trying to make films.”
Having produced off-beat films like Kaalakandi starring Saif Ali Khan, Ashi stresses that it’s the content and the stories that excite her the most, along with the directors of course. She says that she is fortunate to have worked with the best in the industry and that it was a great experience to collaborate with minds like Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap and Karan Johar.
She says:
I am grateful that within one film we dealt with 4 different stories and filmmakers whose thought processes and style of working are very different and it was super interesting. Kudos to the directors for writing such content and thinking of such strong women characters like in Lust Stories.
She adds that it was just by chance that they all ended up telling compelling stories through the woman’s perspective. Well, we sure are super glad they did, because we enjoyed each one of the films!
Talking about her future projects, Ashi says that she is currently working on another anthology with the similar set of directors – Zoya, Karan, Anurag and Dibakar Banarjee – called Ghost Stories in collaboration with Netflix and Ronnie Screwaala. She adds that she is also developing more projects with Netflix, and also has a feature film in the pipeline.
With so many interesting things lined up for her, we can’ t wait to see the stories she brings to us! Congratulations on the nomination again, Ashi and team!