PVR Inox Pictures, the distribution arm of India’s leading multiplex chain PVR Inox, is treating the new MAMI Independent weekly screening series as a discovery mechanism for national theatrical distribution, with the chain’s distribution arm prepared to roll out standout titles across India once identified through the program.
The series – a partnership between the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), which operates the Mumbai Film Festival – and PVR Inox, running every Wednesday at PVR Lido in Mumbai, has drawn strong initial attendance since its Feb. 25 launch. But Kamal Gianchandani, CEO of PVR Inox Pictures, tells Variety the commercial ambition runs deeper than a single weekly slot. The distribution arm is already an active player in the indie space, he notes, having long imported and released independent international titles in India. “PVR Inox Pictures would take the responsibility of distributing that film and ensuring that it travels across the country,” he says of titles surfaced through the program.
The initiative arrives against a backdrop of longstanding frustration among independent Indian filmmakers over multiplex access. Gianchandani pushes back firmly on the idea that screen slots remain the central bottleneck. “I don’t think slot is that big an issue anymore,” he says, citing India’s current multiplex footprint. “Finding films which resonate with Indians, which sort of connect with the audience, that is the challenge.”
For Gianchandani, the series is partly a long-game audience-development exercise. “By seeding such initiatives, we are sort of whetting the appetite of the customers, and hopefully they’ll come back and support more such films as and when they come out with a theatrical release,” he says.
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the filmmaker and Film Heritage Foundation head and Mumbai Film Festival director who is the creative force behind MAMI Independent, envisions the initiative as the first link in a distribution chain that could ultimately empower filmmakers themselves. He tells Variety the aim is to strengthen regional and independent cinema and to build “a kind of a space” that could evolve into a model where “the producers and directors themselves of these independent cinema can become distributors and distribute and take the film all around the region.” For Dungarpur, the program is categorically different from the film societies and clubs that have historically been independent cinema’s only theatrical outlet in India. “There was no screening space which is accessible to the common man, to the common people,” he says of what preceded it.
Dungarpur also frames MAMI Independent as central to the organization’s own reinvention, describing a curatorial mandate – executed by a team of three to four programmers – that is explicitly pan-Indian. “MAMI Independent will truly showcase what is, according to me, would be really the heart of Indian cinema,” he says. “The films are not just pertaining to Mumbai, but from different parts of the country where we can find or discover new voices and new cinema.”
The April 2026 lineup gives shape to that mandate, pairing features and shorts across languages including Ladakhi, Khasi, Kashmiri and Malayalam. All selected titles, including Sundance winner “Nocturnes,” Moscow topper “The Elysian Field” and Shanghai winner “Victoria,” are drawn from the past five years. International programming from Africa, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia is planned for subsequent months.
Expansion of the weekly series to other Indian cities and smaller centers is a stated ambition for both Dungarpur and Gianchandani, who see India’s recently crossed 10,000-screen milestone as a structural tailwind – and an argument that the infrastructure now exists to give independent cinema the national footprint it has historically been denied.
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