A new Paris-based production company dedicated to independent and auteur Indian cinema has entered the market.
Pavo Films, co-founded in by Cosmin Illes and Némésis Srour, announced its formation at the Cannes Film Market, with Gurvinder Singh’s “Rehmat” – starring Naseeruddin Shah – as its debut co-production.
The two co-founders bring complementary backgrounds in streaming and South Asian cinema scholarship. Illes spent over six years at Spideo, working with international streaming platforms including Canal+ and Globo, before serving as head of marketing at LaCinetek, the French filmmaker-curated streaming platform. Srour is the author of “Bollywood Film Traffic” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), a history of Hindi-language cinema’s reach across the Arab world, and has more than a decade of experience distributing and curating Indian and South Asian cinema in France.
For its debut, Pavo Films has come aboard as French co-producer on “Rehmat,” a Punjabi-language feature from Singh, whose previous credits include “Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan” (Venice Horizons, 2011) and “Chauthi Koot” (Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2015). The film, produced by Vahao Studio in India, is currently in post-production.
Set in present-day Punjab, “Rehmat” unfolds across three interconnected stories: a young woman who secretly nurses a wounded stranger while concealing him from police; a family living in the long shadow of a disappearance, with children adrift without a father and an aging grandfather pulled back into the role of household head; and an elderly man who arrives in a village claiming to be God. Shah plays the latter figure, Rashid Ali – a man whose family departed Punjab just before Partition redrew the region along religious lines in 1947, and who returns, after a lifetime spent in England, to the place of his birth.
