Los Angeles-based Flourishing Films has boarded Singapore- and India-based Mumba Devi Motion Pictures‘ “Grand Sugar Daddy” and “Not Today” at the Cannes Film Festival‘s market.
Flourishing is focused on expanding access to Black, diverse and female-driven filmed content originating from the U.S., Africa, the U.K. and worldwide. Mumba Devi, headed by producer Sweta Chhabria and producer-director Aditya Kripalani, makes issue-based films focusing on stories that are mostly to do with gender and burning topics like suicide prevention and mental health. The outfit makes it a point to minimize the male gaze by bringing on board heads of department who are all women.
The Singapore-set film “Grand Sugar Daddy” follows a 70-year-old widower who is introduced to the world of Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. The film traces his conversations with a Singaporean Chinese woman, an Indian woman and a transgender Malay.
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In “Not Today,” a 24-year-old woman from a traditional Muslim family in Mumbai goes to work secretly as a suicide prevention counsellor. On her first day, she encounters a 52-year-old man, standing atop a high-rise wanting to jump. In trying to bring him down, she is forced to confront why she became a suicide prevention counsellor in the first place, and also share a lot of herself to get him to share and open up.
“The heart and soul of both ‘Not Today’ and ‘Grand Sugar Daddy’ jump off the page and into our hearts from the very start. With the intimacy with which the characters are drawn and the unique environments in which these unique stories are woven, we are left with an indelible imprint of having lived these stories as our own. Our plans are to reach a global audience through streaming and digital distribution. Both titles are currently being prepared for both streaming and digital distribution,” a Flourishing Films spokesperson said.
The Mumba Devi team added: “We feel glad that the sales agent we have tied up with has the same core values as us. That’s a lot of luck.”
Mumba Devi, set up in 2016, has produced sex addiction-themed “The Goddess and the Hero” (2019) that won the Netpac award at the Kolkata Film Festival; “The Incessant Fear of Rape” (2018) where a group of women school a sexist man on what the fear of rape feels like; “Tikli and Laxmi Bomb” (2017) where sex workers decide to attain autonomy in their profession; ethnographic documentary “Portrait of a Willow Woman” (2020); and “Art Exodus” (2020) on how the pandemic displaced artists.
The company has an eclectic upcoming slate.
