Indian film fund Cinema Capital Venture Fund (CCVF) has launched a production and financing outfit, Waterfront Films, which will focus on independent Indian movies.

The new venture will invest around $3m a year over three years in indie features. “We’re interested in indie films, not pure arthouse, but in the same space as films like Delhi Belly and Shaitan,” said CCVF managing partner Samir Gupta.

The venture’s first two projects will be Kaizad Gustad’s R&J (working title), which is a contemporary take on Romeo And Juliet, and Shashanka Ghosh’s as-yet-untitled black comedy about gangsters chasing a document that contains a previously undiscovered sexual position of the Kama Sutra.

Gustad previously directed edgy comedy drama Bombay Boys (1998) and Boom (2003), set in the fashion world and starring Amitabh Bachchan and Katrina Kaif. Ghosh directed western spoof Quick Gun Murugun (2009) which was picked up by Twentieth Century Fox for Indian distribution.

Waterfront will fully finance most of the projects on its slate – except in cases where the budget goes above $3-4m.

CCVF, which was granted approval by the Securities and Exchanges Board of India (SEBI) in 2008, previously focused on funding mainstream Hindi cinema such as Vipul Shah’s Action Replayy, starring Akshay Kumar, and Force, with John Abraham.

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