Lala & Poppy

Source: IFFI

‘Lala & Poppy’

Veteran Indian producer Bobby Bedi may be able to claim some kind of record with his new drama Lala & Poppy, which he pitched during last year’s Film Bazaar and has its world premiere at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI).

“After Goa 2024 we took the project to a lab in Spain; confirmed Kaizad Gustad as director; and began shooting in April”, Bedi told Screen. “Along the way, we found people who got behind the film and supported the issues it raises”, he said, referring to casting and recent private screenings held within the LGBTQ+ community.

The Bombay-set film imagines what might happen if both partners in a loving relationship were transgender and wanting to change their assigned sex. Inevitably, perhaps, society objects to their relationship, causing a rupture.

“We wanted to tell a love story in which gender does not play a part,” said Australia-based Gustad, whose credits include 1998 breakout Bombay Boys and 2007’s Bombil And Beatrice. “We want to show that the non-binary community has the same right to love and to be loved as everyone else. In the end, it could have been made in Australia as easily as India. It resonates everywhere.”

Throughout history, there have been lords, idols and gods who have been third gender giving the appearance of acceptance. But the reality has often been at odds with mythology, Bedi points out. In legal terms, India officially recognises people who are neither male, nor female, as third gender. However, contemporary Indian society is not so tolerant.

Gustad, who says the screenplay went through eight years of drafts and considerable consultation with the LGBTQ+ community, said he and Bedi made a point of casting transgender performers. “They are the real deal,” he said, referring to lead actors Suruj Rajkhowa and Veer Singh.

After the film’s premiere in Goa on Sunday (November 23), the producers expect to announce further festival bookings and plan to give the film an Indian theatrical release in the first half on 2026.

Bedi’s Contentflow Studios is in pre-production on Auto Bhagwan a real-time thriller in which an auto-rickshaw driver working the night shift picks up three passengers: a hitman; a businessman who wants to be rid of his pregnant girlfriend; and the dancer girlfriend who hires the same hitman to kill her lover. The film is scripted by Gustad, but a director has yet to be attached.

The company is also working on Kutch, a drama-thriller jointly scripted by Habib Faizal and Bedi, which Bedia describes as being like Chinatown, in that the whole film leads in one direction, but is eventually revealed as being about something else entirely. Even before shooting, the script has already been adapted as a novel.

Bedi also continues to work on Bandit Queen MP, a sequel to Shekar Kapur’s 1994 thriller Bandit Queen. It involves Phoolan Devi, a woman who emerges from a 12-year stretch in jail to become a member of parliament and campaigns for greater women’s representation but is assassinated.

Bedi’s producing credits include some of the most iconic films of modern Indian cinema such as Bandit Queen and Deepa Mehta’s controversial 1996 romantic drama Fire.

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