When Hridaye A Nagpal wanted to make a sci-fi film with spaceships and giant extraterrestrial flowers, he already had what he needed: a solid script, a clear vision, and a working knowledge of AI. A screenwriter and director of Prime Video’s Rainbow Rishta, Nagpal found, for the first time in his career, that Bollywood’s gatekeeping didn’t matter to his creative pursuits. He made his film Hunger in a week using the AI tool InVideo with a team of 20. “I started making AI images with stories, and posted them on social media. Within weeks, I received a lot of traction. I had pitched these stories earlier, but that didn’t receive any interest because they weren’t regular Bollywood stories. Soon I started making AI films,” he says.
With the rise of AI cinema in India, films such as Chiranjeevi Hanuman: The Eternal, Naisha, and Maharaja in Denims are positioning themselves among the country’s first AI-generated features. For aspiring filmmakers, this signals a shift. Armed with ambitious scripts—often rooted in large-scale storytelling such as sci-fi, fantasy, and mythology—they are no longer deterred by the budgets these genres typically demand. What is emerging is not a stream of casual, social media-friendly reels, but a body of work that is increasingly being taken seriously. Film festivals and micro-drama platforms are playing a role in legitimising the space. At Delhi’s first India AI Film Festival, as many as 14 films were screened, with prize money reaching Rs 7 lakh. The event also saw Abundantia Entertainment and InVideo announce a Rs 100 crore AI-driven studio, aiON, aiming to produce five full-length features.
“For our AI film Hunger, we had people working across writing, costume, direction of generation, and mood boards. Like any director, one person holds the overall vision. It’s not that you write a prompt and the film is made.” Hriday a nagpal, filmmakerHridaye Nagpal, filmmaker
For younger filmmakers, the shift is as much about autonomy as it is about access. Bharat Parmar, 24, who won the Best Storytelling award for Anhad at the festival, made the film in under a week on a budget of Rs50,000. “We were a team of three people,” he says. “I have been on film sets. A film needs extensive manpower, and you are also bargaining with your creative freedom. I didn’t want to do any of that.”
Despite its technological backbone, AI filmmaking still mirrors traditional processes. Nagpal is quick to dispel the idea that films are generated through prompts alone. “It’s not that you write a prompt and get a film,” he says. “We had people working across writing, costume, direction of generation, and mood boards. Like any director, one person holds the overall vision.”
For Vivek Anchalia, co-screenplay writer of Rajma Chawal, AI began as an experiment driven by curiosity. “It’s a great brainstorming companion,” he says. His YouTube micro-drama Ulluman has already built a following strong enough to attract interest from OTT platforms. What stands out, he notes, is a shift in perception. “People are talking about characters, stories, and mood. They are overlooking the fact that it’s made with AI. Two years ago, that wouldn’t have been possible.”
Anchalia’s studio, Amazing Indian Stories, now receives ten AI projects for every traditional one. “The AI market is booming,” he says. “We simply don’t have the bandwidth to respond to all the interest.” Across the country, studios dedicated to AI filmmaking are beginning to take shape—from Dil Raju’s Larven AI Studio in Tollywood to Ajay Devgn’s Prismix.
The criticism that AI-generated content lacks emotional depth is one filmmakers acknowledge, but don’t necessarily accept. For Parmar, it is a question of evolution rather than limitation. “Compare what AI was four years ago” he says. “Today, it’s completely different. It may not yet have the expressions audiences expect, but it’s improving every day.” That rapid evolution, however, has its own challenges. Anchalia points to the difficulty of maintaining coherence in long-form storytelling. “The technology evolves so quickly that outputs keep changing,” he says. “It becomes hard to sustain a consistent visual language across a feature film.” Copyright concerns, too, appear less immediate to creators. “It’s a concern when you copy something. What we do is original,” Nagpal says.
For now, AI filmmaking in India is part experimentation, part industry in the making. But for filmmakers, the trajectory is clear: it is only a matter of time before such films come to OTT platforms and theatres.