Can India's Co-Production Boom Bridge The Execution Gap? Charvee Pandya Explains
· Free Press Journal
Cannes 2026 is India's most visible global moment in years. The OTT audience has crossed 601.2 million users. The CTV base grew 85% in a single year, according to The Ormax OTT Audience Report: 2025. Four Indian women producers are heading to the Marché du Film. The deals are being made, and the ambition is there. The question the industry hasn't answered yet: what does execution require?
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To answer that question, we turned to Charvee Pandya, a producer whose career is itself the proof of concept for what India's international ambitions require. She built the production infrastructure on internationally mounted films that went on to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), outside a support function, as the systems architect who made complex, multi-country shoots manageable. She joined a new streaming platform and led the development of its first Hindi original, building the creative and operational pipeline from the ground up while completing production through a global pandemic. She returned to one of India's most independently funded film festivals after a three-year hiatus and integrated nine isolated departments into a single connected ecosystem serving 25,000 delegates across 16 venues. And she designed a voting architecture that corrected a structural bias most festival administrators never think to question, one whose logic applies equally to streaming recommendation engines, grant processes, and competition juries.
There is no escalation path in any of this work. When the system held, it held because she built it to. We spoke with Pandya because she has already done what India's co-production boom now demands, never in a pitch deck, never in a workshop, but in production, under pressure, across four different institutional environments. What she found reveals the gap the industry has not yet named.
Charvee, International film festivals have long been dominated by European and American voices. South Asian cinema is arriving, but the question is whether it's arriving on its own terms or being filtered through someone else's framework. As a juror at WorldFest-Houston, evaluating work across features, shorts, screenplays, and documentaries from over 20 countries, where does South Asian cinema stand right now?
The stories are there; that much is clear. South Asian narratives are landing internationally in a way they genuinely weren't a decade ago. Diaspora identity, intergenerational conflict, culturally specific textures, these are resonating with international audiences now.
But what the jury process keeps revealing is that technical ambition often runs ahead of story clarity. The submissions that worked, regardless of budget, were emotionally legible within the first few minutes. That's as much a producing instinct as a directing one.
WorldFest has been running since 1961. Being one of the very few South Asians evaluating that breadth of international work, features, shorts, screenplays, and documentaries, you feel how much the producing infrastructure still needs to catch up with the storytelling to be consistently at those tables.
India's co-production pipeline is growing. Many Indian producers who enter international markets find themselves underprepared once the deal is made. You've spent a decade moving across production coordination, studio development, festivals, and independent cinema. What is the gap that most people entering this space still underestimate?
The gap is rarely creative. Indian filmmakers have an instinctive understanding of story, emotion, and character. What trips people up is production discipline, the invisible architecture. On international productions, prep is treated as sacred. Deal memos, crew onboarding documents, transportation movement charts, ground production structures: these aren't bureaucracy. They're what allow a director to focus entirely on the work. In the Indian system at the time I was starting, production coordination was still being defined as a discipline. I came from a background in computer engineering, and I approached production as a systems problem from day one. The documentation formats I built during those early years, crew communication systems, hospitality structures, and interdepartmental coordination frameworks are still being adapted and used by production teams today. That kind of infrastructure is what lets a complex, multi-country production hold together.
Auteur cinema and large-scale commercial productions demand completely different environments. You worked as Production Coordinator on TIFF premieres like The Wedding Guest and Maya, then moved to stunt-heavy, multi-country productions with massive international casts. What does operating across both worlds require?
The discipline is the same; what changes is the scale and the pressure. On something like Maya or The Wedding Guest, the environment is intimate. Every decision carries creative weight, so precision really matters. There's a closeness to the work. Then you step into a stunt-heavy, multi-country production with a massive international cast, and the variables just multiply. Everything is louder, faster, and higher stakes.
What allowed me to move between those two worlds wasn't purely experience. It was a reputation. People need to know that when you're responsible for something, you'll be calm under pressure and completely prepared. You can't fake that. It builds project by project, and there are genuinely no shortcuts.
India's OTT boom arrived almost overnight. You worked on Hiccups & Hookups, the studio’s first Hindi original, completing it during the full uncertainty of COVID-19. The series achieved an IMDb rating above 8, and its lead actress, Lara Dutta, won the ScreenXX Best Actress Viewer's Choice Award. What does building a production pipeline from scratch involve that nobody talks about?
The content conversation gets all the attention. Nobody talks about what building a creative pipeline from the ground up requires. At Lionsgate India, we were developing original series in a market where OTT culture had only just arrived. There was no template for how to run a writers' room in Hindi, how to adapt an international format for Indian sensibilities, how to structure episodic development across a full season. We were making those decisions in real time, alongside showrunners and directors, while simultaneously managing casting, budgeting, and production timelines. The episodic format demanded an entirely different producing instinct than features, season-level story logic, character arcs across episodes, and the rhythm of a writers' room. Completing a series through a global pandemic, while that infrastructure was still being invented, required leading creatively and operationally at the same time. That combination is what nobody talks about.
A major film festival running on fragmented, manual systems at scale doesn't create inefficiency; it creates failure. You returned to the Mumbai Film Festival as Head of Operations, one of the largest in the festival's history, with over 300 films from more than 70 countries and over 25,000 registered delegates and attendees. What was the scope of the transformation you led?
Every department was running in isolation: programming, scheduling, accreditation, press, all separate, all manual. At a festival with a large footfall, that doesn't just create inefficiency. It creates failure during live execution. So we brought everything into one connected system. The website, ticketing, accreditation, and filmmaker interfaces are all centralised. We collaborated hand in hand with BookMyShow directly, so audiences had three ways to access programming, one data environment behind all of it. We also built a viewing system for the press and buyers. And for the first time, filmmakers could see who was watching their work. That visibility simply hadn't existed before.
Audience awards at festivals are supposed to measure what audiences genuinely responded to, yet standard voting systems are structurally biased toward larger venues rather than stronger reactions. You designed a weighted percentile-based scoring model at the Mumbai Film Festival specifically to solve that problem. Why does the architecture you built matter beyond one festival?
A simple average would've made the award meaningless. A film in a 500-seat venue automatically dominates a film in a 100-seat venue, purely on volume, with no regard for how audiences actually responded. That's measuring venue capacity, when the real question is audience enthusiasm. So we designed a backend scoring model that weighted ratings dynamically across venues, pulling data in real time, for both the desktop and the app interface.
The eventual winner, a Bhutanese film that, under a raw-number system, would likely have been crowded out entirely, confirmed the system was working. And this bias exists everywhere, in streaming algorithms, grant processes, and competition juries. Same architecture problem, different context.
In a studio system, the financial foundation and institutional credibility already exist; your job is to execute within that structure. Your project, Bhool Chook (Errors and Omissions), secured backing from over 40 international donors, reached the finals of the AAPI Renaissance Rally, and was shot in Los Angeles, an operationally unfamiliar territory. What does independent producing demand that studio work doesn't?
In a studio system, someone else has already established the financial foundation and institutional credibility. Your job is to execute within that structure. As an independent producer, you are building belief in a project from nothing, fundraising internationally, assembling collaborators who trust your vision before the project has any proof of itself, making creative decisions that also have to be financially defensible, and carrying all of it simultaneously across development, production, and post-production. There is no escalation path. What Bhool Chook required was every layer of experience from before, the production discipline from international sets, the development thinking from Lionsgate, the systems instinct from the festival, applied entirely on my own terms, in an unfamiliar environment. Producing is ultimately about creating the conditions for stories to exist, even when the path forward is uncertain and solitary.
Charvee, you've taken projects from development through delivery across studio, festival, and independent environments. For a producer serious about competing internationally, where does the real work begin?
Story, and the discipline to protect it. The producers who succeed internationally understand that the job begins long before the camera rolls, in development, in choosing what story to tell and why, in building the conditions under which it can actually be made. On Bhool Chook, every decision, fundraising, casting, crew, and location was made in service of what the story required. That instinct comes from understanding production deeply enough to solve problems without compromising the work. The producers India needs internationally are not just executors. They are the first believers in a story, and the ones still standing when delivery comes.