A podcast series focused on Indian and international independent cinema, celebrating the indie spirit through inspiration, practical playbooks, and hard-earned insights from sterling creators.
Hosted by ecosystem builder, serial entrepreneur, and debut indie filmmaker Anand Gurnani.
Make Films Happen begins with admiration, curiosity, and need. It is a space for serious conversations about how independent films are imagined, financed, shaped, doubted, endured, and finally brought into the world.
The series moves between Indian and international independent cinema, staying close to process, temperament, and the lived realities behind the work.
It is less interested in mythology than in practice, less interested in performance than in what artists keep faith with when the work asks everything of them.
The ecosystem can expect a rich mix of formats, including one-on-one conversations, panel discussions, Meet the Teams sessions, roundtables, craft deep dives, and much more.
Season 1 unfolds across 24 episodes, each turning toward a different facet of the independent filmmaking journey. The conversations stay close to dream, money, labour, improvisation, voice, pain, joy, and the long private work of getting a film made.
Where does the indie film dream begin, and what separates dreamers from starters?
What it takes to begin when you have no permission, no precedent, and no safety net.
How do you sustain forward motion through years of resistance and invisible progress?
Doing what the system says you're not qualified, funded, or connected for.
When everyone has reasons why it won't work, conviction is the last thing standing.
Conviction without pragmatism is delusion. How do you balance vision with reality?
Making a film look 10x its budget, through invention, not compromise.
The unsexy infrastructure that separates finished films from abandoned ones.
The plan meets reality. The controlled chaos of turning screenplay into footage.
Beyond personal ambition, why does this film need to exist in the world?
The stretch where the entire enterprise feels insane, and how you survive it.
When the plan breaks, improvisation becomes the filmmaker's most critical skill.
Beyond improvisation, when nothing is under control and you navigate anyway.
The film is done, now the terrifying act of showing your work to the world.
When the film connects, when a stranger's eyes change and an audience gasps.
The physical, emotional, and financial toll nobody warns you about.
Your unique perspective, the one thing no budget can buy and no studio can replicate.
The tonal, stylistic signature that makes a film unmistakably yours.
The numbers conversation, raw and honest. How money gets found, spent, and lost.
The losses, the sacrifices, the things that broke along the way.
Hundreds of decisions, dozens of people, multiple locations, zero infrastructure.
The moments of pure, transcendent joy amid all the struggle.
What does winning look like for an indie filmmaker? It's not always Cannes.
The deep satisfaction of having done the thing most people only talk about.
Since then, life has taken me through many journeys. I started my first entrepreneurial venture at fifteen, spent much of my late teens around film sets, and over the years worked as a journalist, writer, editor, and publisher. I went on to build and accelerate ecosystems across digital media and entertainment, especially animation, VFX, and games, in India and globally. For well over a decade now, I have also been deeply immersed in digital transformation, immersive technology, and AI.
Along the way, I have served as jury member, speaker, moderator, organiser, and curator at forums, trade fairs, conferences, and festivals across India and around the world. I have done many things, built many things, and been part of many meaningful worlds.
And yet, through all of it, those films I was making in my head as a teenager never really left me.
Over the past four years, one of those inner films has taken real shape on the page. It has gone through forty-two drafts, with a final draft now finally in sight. It is my debut indie musical, with ten glorious songs at the heart of a poignant and tender love story.
And still, the film is not made.
That is the juncture at which I find myself today. Nervous, yet confident. Anxious, yet exuberant. A point at which I know I have to make the dive and make my film happen. It is not going to make itself. And while a part of me could happily take the script to the grave, because in my head the film already exists in full, this time I want to manifest it on screen too.
Filmmaking holds a great deal of joy and a great deal of pain. Indie filmmaking takes both to another level altogether. As a debut indie filmmaker myself, I am deeply interested in the inspiring, illuminating, and immensely absorbing journeys of filmmakers and their films.
And while I begin this podcast as a first-time feature filmmaker, I am far from new to this world. Over the years, I have had close interactions and friendships with some of the finest independent animation filmmakers and studios in the world. Those relationships have only deepened my respect for the courage, labour, madness, and devotion it takes to bring a film into being.
That is where Make Films Happen comes from.
This is my attempt to learn in public, go deeper into the real journey of making independent films, and create the kind of conversations I myself need at this point in my life.
If you would like to hear when the first season begins to arrive, leave your email here. It is the simplest way to stay close to the project.
Used only for occasional updates on the series.
A podcast series focused on Indian and international independent cinema.
© 2026 Anand Gurnani. Built with conviction.