What is Indian National Cine Academy? Newly formed body INCA aims to bridge the gap between Bollywood and South film industry

SS Rajamouli’s Baahubali franchise and RRR (2022), Sukumar’s Pushpa franchise, and Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 AD (2024) among others in Telugu; Rajinikanth’s Jailer and Vijay’s Mersal among others in Tamil; Rishab Shetty’s Kantara franchise and Prashanth Neel’s KGF franchise in Kannada; and most recently, Dominic Arun’s Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra among others in Malayalam have transcended regional boundaries and made a mark at the box office across India and worldwide.

INCA attempts to bridge the gap between Hindi cinema and these South Indian film industries, by facilitating cross-pollination of talent and pan-India access to regional films, projecting the Indian film industry as one whole unit. INCA also includes seven other regional film industries — Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Assamese, and Odia — which are yet to break out at a pan-India and global level like the South Indian film industries have.

Who’s running INCA?

INCA has been founded by producer Vishnu Vardhan Induri, who has backed films across languages under his banner Vibri Media. These include NTR, Krish Jagarlamudi’s two-part Telugu biopic of late actor-politician NT Rama Rao; Thalaivii, AL Vijay’s 2021 Tamil biopic of late actor-politician J Jayalalithaa, starring Kangana Ranaut; and Kabir Khan’s 2021 Bollywood sports drama 83, starring Ranveer Singh. Vishnu already has a rich experience of bringing together talent and conceiving successful initiatives like the South Indian International Movie Awards (SIIMA) and the Celebrity Cricket League (CCL), which extends across film industries.

The Producers Guild of India, led by Shibasish Sarkar, Group CEO of Reliance Entertainment, also serves as a “chief patron” of INCA. Film industry members who came together to support the launch of INCA include Bollywood filmmakers Rohit Shetty, Aanand L Rai, Vipul Shah, and Anand Gandhi, actor Ahan Shetty, singer Hans Raj Hans, Bengali actor Prosenjit Chatterjee, producer Srikant Mohta, Telugu producer Dil Raju, Bhojpuri actor Manoj Tiwari, Tamil actor Khushbu Sundar, Telugu actor Lakshmi Manchu, and Marathi actor-filmmaker Subodh Bhave, among others.

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Initiatives by INCA

For starters, INCA will hold its inaugural awards show on March 9 in Mumbai, in which the categories and participation will cut across languages and regions. It also plans to organize an annual Cinema Conclave, featuring representation of film professionals from across India. INCA is also in the process of developing a comprehensive pan-India database, consisting of contacts and details of actors, technicians, and film professionals from all the 12 regional film industries in order to aid cross-pollination of talent.