The Hindu Business Line : White Stripes Entertainment forays into film making

AMONG the various entities from the corporate world that had made a foray into film making, White Stripes Entertainment has decided to cautiously tread into this arena.

While many others have opted for the studio model, White Stripes Entertainment, a 100 per cent subsidiary of pharmaceutical company DIL Ltd, had decided to take one film project at a time.

Whites Stripes Entertainment is ready with its first film project, an English film titled American Blend. The film, which is awaiting a distribution tie-up, has been chosen for the opening gala of Riverside International Film Festival (RIFF) 2006.

"It is a cross-cultural film portraying a family with members from many races," says Mr Krishna Datla, Managing Director, DIL Ltd.

According to the film's synopsis, available in RIFF Web site, it is about the Chadha family - Californians on the outside, but Indians deep within. Raj Chadha (Anupam Kher) has two loves - food and Bollywood. He runs a restaurant, Bollywood Café.

Raj has two children-Nikita (Niki) and Brijesh (BJ). After the death of his wife, Raj marries Jayme (Dee Wallace Stone), a Caucasian American who has a daughter, Maya. "Life in the Chadha home sails by smoothly... until lightning strikes without warning, and unearths a secret that has lain buried for years," the synopsis says. The film has several songs composed by Abu Malik, brother of Anu Malik.

Mr Datla is looking at a summer-monsoon release of the film in India. "It is a film for the urban audience so the release would be confined to cities and multiplexes. We are currently in talks with distribution companies in India and pursuing leads in the US. We plan to release in the UK as well," Mr Datla said.

The film would categorise under the small budget movies as per the Bollywood finance scales and was funded in house. "Since this was our first project we had to dip into our funds. Now that we have something to show we do see the potential of leveraging from banks and financial institutions for our future projects," he said.

Once this film is through, White Stripes would commence its next project. "We are looking at doing more than one film a year. Being a new entity we would take the first couple of projects one at a time. Once we are comfortable scaling up would be the way to go," he said.