Anurag Kashyap

Forty-one-year-old director, screenwriter, and producer Anurag Kashyap is the most highly-acclaimed moviemaker working in India today. In 2012 the Cannes festival screened his ambitious gangster saga Gangs of Wasseypur. At the same festival last year the filmmaker presented his writer-director effort Ugly (2013), as well as the popular The Lunchbox, which he coproduced. His second feature Black Friday (2004), a controversial treatment of the horrific 1993 Bombay bombings, participated in the Locarno festival. Powerful storyteller Kashyap, who ingeniously injects Western cinematic stylings into Indian situations, also generated accolades with No Smoking (2007), a noirish comic psychological thriller with surrealist elements loosely based on a story by Stephen King.

MFF Karlovy Vary