Choose how to watch the opening.
The screenplay of our lives is already written.
We just don’t know the next scene.
Rohit GuptaINT. CORPORATE AMERICA. 2008.
A career on the rise.
Then came four weeks off,
to get this film thing out of his system.
Little did he know.
It did the opposite.
New York Film Academy · 2008
Ten ways in — take any one
In 2008 Rohit Gupta joined a four-week workshop at the New York Film Academy, a film school in New York, then enrolled in its one-year filmmaking program.
His first short, Another Day, Another Life, began there as a student assignment. A four-week detour that never ended.
With an MBA in hand and four weeks booked at the New York Film Academy, he expected to return to business when the workshop ended. The workshop was meant to get filmmaking out of his system. It did the opposite.
Four minutes of suspense, shot in seven hours as a student exercise. By the time it was finished, the detour had become the life. It went to the Short Film Corner at the Festival de Cannes, was selected by more than thirty festivals on four continents, won Best First Film at Swansea Bay and again in Thailand — thirteen wins in all — and was broadcast across India on NDTV Prime in 2014.
A one-minute silent, black and white, made as a mise-en-scène exercise — one take, no cuts. His first project at the Academy. He polished it, released it properly in 2011, and it took Best Silent Film at the 28th Goldie Film Awards. Nothing he touched stayed an exercise.
A Panasonic DVX100, ten days, and about $4,000 of his own savings. Two national firsts in the Limca Book of Records, and a sweep of the 28th Goldie Film Awards — seven wins in one night.
Shortlisted as one of five global Indians by Times Now, for Distinctive Global Achievement in Arts & Entertainment.
Nine strangers, one smoking lounge, largely improvised. Jury Choice for Best Film of the Festival at the Cannabis Film Festival; a Platinum Award at Oregon. Streaming worldwide since.
He never wanted to be a festival person. He wanted to make films — the circuit was the toll you paid to get them seen. But ten years of learning it the expensive way is knowledge, and other filmmakers kept asking for it. So it became a service: strategy and distribution across 20+ platforms.
February 2020. Associate director on the first schedule of a Bollywood boxing biopic — Captain Hawa Singh, Asian Games gold in 1966 and 1970, the man Indian boxing calls its father. Salman Khan unveiled the first look on the fourth; the schedule ran that month. Weeks later the pandemic closed everything, and the film never reached release. Not every credit becomes a film.
Also not planned. The same spring that closed Hawa Singh closed every festival on earth, and films finished in lockdown had nowhere to premiere. So he opened one that could not be shut — digital, no venue to close, no border to cross, open to any filmmaker anywhere. The whole world was struggling; this came up, and it came up for everybody. Now in its sixth edition, and named Global Digital Film Festival of the Year at the LUXlife Creative & Visual Arts Awards 2025, United Kingdom.
Marketing, distribution and publicity with R. Madhavan at Tricolour Films — a two-person team taking the film out to the world. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film.
September 2025. A comedy channel that is really a laboratory: generative video, voice and edit tools tested in public, published as short comedy so the experiments carry a real deadline and a real audience. The joke is the output. The point is finding out what these tools can actually carry on a film.
Click a year, or click the card to turn it.
