Tusshar and Ekta Kapoor at the premiere of 'Shorr' at MIAAC

Ekta Kapoor - from TV Serials to Edgy Cinema

Ekta Kapoor is a self-made millionaire and, as the head of Balaji Telefilms, she’s produced over 74 hugely popular television serials which are said to make up about 80 percent of television programming in India.  Recently the Queen of TV Soaps  was in town for the premiere of the gritty, fast moving ‘Shorr’ at the 2010 MIAAC Film Festival in New York. It is as real and as different as you can get from the sugar coated melodrama of the television serials steeped in tradition and changing social mores.

While the serials are produced under the Balaji brand, ‘Shorr’ and the even stronger and in-your-face ‘Love, Sex and Dhoka’ are produced by Alt Films, a division of Balaji Motion Pictures. So how does the same person create two very different world-views?

“Balaji is clearly a family,  traditional en masse content provider but there’s an underground movement happening in India and a new sensibility is being born – people want to see different films, different entertainment,” says Kapoor. “In order to not hurt the mother brand or in any way give conflicting signals, we decided to start an alternative brand called Alt Entertainment.”

Shorr, which premiered at MIAAC, is made by Ekta Kapoor's Alt Entertainment and stars Sendhil Ramamurthy & Tusshar Kapoor