LUCKNOW: The proposed Film City project in Uttar Pradesh will be set up on 1,000-acre land identified in Gautam Buddh Nagar, Chief Minister Yog Adityanath on Tuesday announced.
He was presiding over the first meeting attended by around 35 well-known film personalities from Bollywood and South India film industry here on Tuesday.
The land for the ambitious project has been identified by Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) in Sector 21 of Gautam Buddh Nagar along the Yamuna Expressway. The site of the project, which the CM said would come up as a ‘Dedicated Infotainment Zone’ equipped with all the world-class civil, public, and technological facilities, is just 6 km away from the upcoming Jewar Internal airport and approximately 23 km from the Zero Point.
The Film City itself would cover around 780 acres of the area and the rest 220-acre land would be developed as the commercial hub.
Counting its positives, the CM said that the proposed site was just an hour away from New Delhi and very close to the proposed International Airport at Jewar, the biggest greenfield airport in Asia.
“Being close to Agra, the city of the Taj, and Mathura, the birthplace of Lord Krishna, and being near to the proposed logistic hub in Noida, it won’t face any glitches as far as facilities of transport and movement are concerned,” said the CM.
Notably, the project gained momentum after a number of film personalities welcomed the project which CM Yogi had announced while reviewing the progress of the ongoing development projects of the Meerut division last Friday.
While presiding over the meeting over the project, CM Yogi called upon the film fraternity to come and join the effort to make it one of the best and biggest film facilities matching the global standards.
CM Yogi justified the project in UP by saying that the state was huge in terms of population, it was surrounded by seven states and provided a mystical and unmatched mosaic of culture, dialects, religion, Vedic and mythological historicity.
He reiterated that the idea behind the project was to make it the best Dedicated Infotainment Zone of the country. He said his government was well aware of
the present trend of OTT and Media Streaming Platforms and hence the high capacity world-class data centre along with all pre-production and the post-production infrastructure, processing labs, VFX, and digital technology of international level would be provided in this zone.
A bevy of film personalities, including the actors, singers, composers, directors, producers, and writers immediately lapped up the project as a 'right step at the right time'. Those who had come down to Lucknow to attend the meeting included producer-director Shailesh Singh, writer-producer from down South Vijyendra Prasad, chief of Film Directors’ Association Ashok Pandit, popular singer Kailash Kher, actor Manoj Joshi, famous art director Nitin Desai, singers Udit Narayan and Anoop Jalota, producers-directors Pama Kumar and Vinod Bachchan.
Around 25 prominent actors and directors including Anupam Kher, Satish Kaushik, Rajinikanth, his daughter Soundarya, Paresh Rawal, Vivek Agnihotri, Neeraj Pandey, David Dhawan, Subhash Ghai, Bhushan Kumar (T-Series), Shariq Patel (Zee Studio), Raveena Tandon, Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, famous lyricist Manoj Muntashir, etc. joined the meeting through Zoom.
While Soundarya Rajinikanth suggested the inclusion of an institution to train animation technologists in the film city, Anupam Kher offered to be a part of the project right from the inception.
Art director Nitin Desai offered to set up an entire Film City on the lines of what he had done in Mumbai. He was of the opinion that about 80 per cent of technicians and workforce in Mumbai film industry was from UP and after the industry in UP itself, the availability of manpower would never be a problem. Sandeep Singh of Vistas Media, a Singapore based Company, offered to set up a Film Academy with an initial investment of 10 million dollars.
Welcoming the proposal, Paresh Rawal, chairman, National School of Drama, suggested that the Film City should have a facility to train scriptwriters as it would rejuvenate the regional film industry. Actor Manoj Joshi felt that the Film City would not only create jobs for the youth of this region but would also add a new dimension to the tourism industry of UP. Almost all those who attended the meeting offered their support and contribution in making the project a success.