Lights, Algorithms, Action – Reimagining Cinema with Artificial Intelligence

Smriti Kiran is an independent creator, media consultant and thought leader with over 25 years of experience in the Indian film industry. She is the founder of Polka Dots Lightbox, a company dedicated to developing and creatively steering narratives for film and series, shaping concepts for broadcast and digital, discovering and spotlighting talent, building festival, marketing and social media strategy for film projects, putting together creative and organisational blueprint for cultural institutions, film events, content and creative strategy for production houses, curating and creating film programmes and communities, and leading key conversations around content and trends in the industry.  A vocal gender equality champion, she is committed to strengthening Maitri: The Female First Collective that she created in early 2022 in partnership with Amazon Prime Video.  Smriti worked as the Artistic Director of Mumbai Film Festival and Mumbai Academy Of Moving Image. Under her leadership the festival evolved into a cutting-edge entity, programming the best of global cinema, discovering new talent and fertilising the local cinematic landscape for visibility, growth and opportunities. She launched the prolific and one-of-a-kind Year-Round Programme at MAMI that slowly built a large, passionate, dedicated multi-city film community across India. Smriti conceptualised the unique Word-to Screen market that connected the Indian literary world with the Indian film industry. At MAMI she also introduced the industry programme that had top-of-the-line film professionals from around the globe participate in hyper-curated mentorship sessions with local talent. She is the creator and host of the clutter-breaking digital properties Dial M For Films, Writers’ Block, Storytellers Are Us and How to Build A Woman. Smriti has served on multiple international film festival juries (Jerusalem International Film Festival, Cairo International Film Festival, Munich International Film Festival), conducted and participated in global conversations on film, and curated for global platforms. She was one of the eight industry experts invited to decide on the Array Google feature film grant for the underrepresented last year. Passionate about the discourse on cinema, Smriti was the Creative Director on The Front Row and Star Verdict. Both shows brought discerning and nuanced conversations around cinema into the mainstream. In the spirit of buoying credible journalism in cinema she co-founded Film Companion in 2014. An avid believer in the power of narratives, she wrote the screenplay book of the record-breaking film 3 Idiots and produced the screenplay books of auteur extraordinaire Guru Dutt.

Harikrishnan Pillai is the CEO and co-founder of TheSmallBigIdea, a full-service leading independent digital agency. Being a marketing head to brands before he set off on an entrepreneurial journey, Hari understands the pain point of consistency and quality of service delivery with service providers. Armed with an MBA and a diploma in Innovation and Design from Sweden, Hari started his career with ZEE TV in the marketing team. Hari worked on some iconic shows like Jhansi Ki Rani (which brought back period drama on TV) & Pavitra Rishta (which helped ZEE regain the 9PM slot), Dance India Dance (the show that changed the future of dance reality shows in the country) & ZEE Cine Awards (Singapore). After a few successful years at ZEE, Hari moved as a brand lead for Thrill, a Joint Venture between Reliance Broadcast Network Limited and RTL Europe. Hari wears multiple hats of that of an early-stage investor with an ed-tech startup, Talestroke Institute and that of speaker on youth issues, innovation and leadership. He has been a jury member for Promax India and India Radio Forum for multiple editions. He has been a speaker at multiple CII Industry-Education forums speaking actively about the need for industry-academia connect. He has been on the academic boards for media studies at Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research and does occasional lectures/workshops at various B-Schools in Mumbai. He has been associated actively with the Rotary International for over a decade and has held critical positions in state and national councils of Rotaract. He started various iconic projects supporting education for the underprivileged and has set up libraries in various schools in Mumbai under project Granthalay.  

Devdatta Potnis has 17 years of experience across different areas within the media content business - from producing & financing original content for all leading OTT & Pay TV platforms to marketing of films & branded entertainment to celebrity management across organizations like Star, Viacom18, Balaji, Reliance, Cosmos-Maya among others. As Chief Growth Officer at Cosmos-Maya, he closed $100+ million content commissioning deals for 25 global TV series, expanding the studio to 1000+ members. He forged a global network, enabling content sales in 120+ countries and launched a YouTube network with 35 channels, amassing 90 million+ subscribers and 50 billion+ views. As the CEO of Animeta, he is fully committed to revolutionizing the Creator Economy with an AI-powered, scalable, and long-tail-driven Creator Tech Product. His passion for content creation drives this endeavor, complemented by his exploration of language through poetry vlogs and prose writing.

Prateek Arora is a writer experimenting with AI image-making to generate new fictional worlds and alternative realities. He works in the entertainment industry and his work is heavily informed by that context. His initial engagement with image-making was as a street photographer while studying in Delhi. Prateek’s work examines the impact of popular culture on memory and identity, technological progress as an index of cultural change, and the potency of genre cinema as a conduit for otherwise repressed or censored ideas. Prateek’s work has been featured in publications such as Homegrown, Grazia, Designboom, and WePresent. Prateek’s first solo show Rocketganj opened in November at the Photoink gallery in New Delhi and his work has been exhibited at India Art Fair, Art Mumbai and PhotoVogue Milan

Vishal Bhalla is the Co-founder and CTO at Fourie. Vishal graduated from the Technical University of Munich with a major in Artificial Intelligence (AI). He has published 5 research papers in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and is a reviewer at workshops of top peer-reviewed international Machine Learning (ML) conferences. Vishal interned with auto co-pilot teams at BMW and NVIDIA to further research on in-car AI assistants and later accelerated his global applied AI experience by dabbling in his own entrepreneurial ideas. He was the founding member of Elia, a language learning startup and has also worked at Amazon to launch Hindi for Alexa. Vishal is attracted by the myriad possibilities at the intersection of art, science and society to come up with alternative narratives. Vishal’s first foray into writing was with sports reportage across a few digital portals and he hopes to someday complete his (non AI written) fiction story!