There are production companies that define themselves by what they make. The genre, the budget level, the type of story. And there are production companies that define themselves by how they work, by the relationships they build, the territories they understand, and the specific kind of problem-solving they have developed over years of doing difficult things in complex places.
Celluloid Pact is the second kind.
We are a film production and consulting company led by Manav Paul and KR Harish, operating across India, Southeast Asia, MENA, and Europe. Our work spans line production, remake rights, co-productions, on-location consulting, and the full range of production services that take a project from brief to screen. We have production credits across some of the most commercially significant Indian and Indonesian films of the last fifteen years, and we have built on-location expertise across territories that range from the Rajasthan desert to the streets of Tbilisi.
This is an account of who we are, what we do, and why the way we work produces better films.
The People
Manav Paul has been working in film production across India and Southeast Asia for over two decades. His credits include line production and supervising producer roles on films including Quick Gun Murugun, Badhaai Ho, Drishyam, Haji Backpacker, and the Buya Hamka biographical epic. He has worked across multiple languages, Hindi, Tamil, Bahasa Indonesia, and across production scales that range from lean independent shoots to large-scale studio productions. His on-location work has taken him to Ajmer, Jordan, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Tbilisi, among others.
KR Harish brings a complementary set of production relationships and expertise, with credits that span the Indian production landscape and extend into the cross-territory work that has defined Celluloid Pact’s most recent phase of growth. Together, they represent a production partnership built on complementary strengths and a shared understanding of what good production actually requires.
The Territories
India
India is where Celluloid Pact’s foundation was built, and it remains the centre of gravity for the majority of our production work. The Indian film industry is one of the most complex production environments in the world, not because it lacks infrastructure, but because the infrastructure is distributed unevenly across a vast geography, operates according to relationship dynamics that take years to understand, and moves at a pace that rewards preparation and punishes improvisation.
The active Indian footprint runs across the country’s major production corridors. Mumbai is the commercial centre, Bollywood, the OTT studios, the rental houses, the working day rates that anchor every Indian budget. Delhi handles government, heritage, and ministerial-permit work; Rajasthan delivers the desert and palace heritage that international productions come specifically for (Jodhpur, Udaipur, Jaisalmer, Jaipur); Kerala covers the backwaters and Western Ghats; Goa runs the coastal and stand-in work; Hyderabad and Bengaluru anchor the southern Indian commercial and technology corridors respectively. Each region operates with its own permit committee, its own crew bench, and its own seasonal rhythm, what works in Rajasthan from October to March falls apart in May, and what runs cleanly in Mumbai any day of the year tightens during the monsoon shoot block.
The Indian credits sit at the heart of the practice, Drishyam (Malayalam original through the Hindi remakes and now the August 2026 Indonesian release and the announced Hollywood adaptation, making it the most-remade film property to originate in Indian cinema), Stree, Badhaai Ho, Manjha, Quick Gun Murugun, House Arrest, Tequila Nights, and the on-location production diaries from Mumbai, Rajasthan, and Ajmer. Our film production portfolio documents the full Indian and cross-border work with context on each title. Region-specific cluster posts covering Mumbai, Delhi, Rajasthan, Kerala, and Goa are in pipeline development as part of the next publishing phase, each carrying the same operational depth as the published Morocco, Jordan, and Portugal pieces but applied to the Indian region permits, crew, and budget realities that international producers most often underestimate.
Our India production network covers Mumbai, Delhi, Rajasthan, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and the full South India corridor, from the studio infrastructure of Hyderabad and Bengaluru to the heritage location landscape of Rajasthan and the coastal environments of Kerala and Goa. The relationships we have built across this network, with crew, fixers, location departments, permit offices, and production houses, are the product of two decades of active production work, not a directory of contacts assembled for the purpose.
Southeast Asia
Indonesia is our primary Southeast Asian territory, and the depth of our work there, anchored by our Indonesia line production operation across Jakarta, Bali, and Yogyakarta, reflects a genuine long-term commitment to the market rather than opportunistic engagement. Our Indonesian credits include Keluarga Slamet, the remake of Badhaai Ho that demonstrated what cross-cultural adaptation looks like when it is done with production rigour, Haji Backpacker, Buya Hamka Vol. 1 & 2, and Titik Nol.
The Indonesian film industry is expanding rapidly, with a domestic audience that is increasingly engaged with locally produced content and a production infrastructure that is developing to meet that demand. Celluloid Pact’s position in this market is built on the relationships developed across those productions, with Indonesian directors, producers, crew heads, and production houses who have worked with us and know what to expect.
MENA
Our MENA work runs through two active corridors. Jordan has become one of the most significant production destinations in the region for international shoots seeking Middle Eastern geography, the combination of accessible desert landscapes (Wadi Rum, Petra, Aqaba), the Royal Film Commission as a functional national coordinator, and a permitting environment that actively supports international productions makes it one of the more production-friendly territories anywhere. The operational architecture is mapped in our Jordan filming reference. Morocco runs the second MENA corridor, Casablanca as the entry, Marrakech as the production base, and Ouarzazate as the Saharan studio capital that has been hosting biblical and historical stand-in productions since the 1960s. The corridor architecture, the CCM permit framework, and the 30% cash rebate are covered in our Morocco filming reference.
Our on-location work in Jordan, covering the Wadi Rum desert, the ancient city of Petra, and the production infrastructure of Amman, has built the institutional relationships that international productions need before they arrive. The MENA region more broadly, including Dubai, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, represents a growing part of our consulting work as international productions increasingly look to the region for locations that European and North American landscapes cannot provide.
Europe
Portugal is now the most active European territory in the practice, Lisbon and Sintra in the centre, the Algarve cliff coast in the south, and Madeira as the autonomous-region option that unlocks a 40% SCRI.PT cash rebate uplift versus the 30% mainland rate. The three-region operational view is documented in our Portugal filming reference. Beyond Portugal, Tbilisi has emerged as one of the more genuinely interesting production destinations in the European corridor, a city whose architectural layering creates a visual environment that can serve multiple production briefs simultaneously. Our on-location work there sits within a broader European consulting practice that supports productions seeking locations beyond the established Western European circuits.
The Work
Line Production
Line production is the core of what Celluloid Pact offers, the function that translates creative ambition into physical reality across crew, locations, permits, equipment, budget, and schedule. Our line production credits span Quick Gun Murugun, Badhaai Ho, the Drishyam franchise, Stree, House Arrest, Plan A Plan B, What the Fish, Rainbow Fields, Manjha, Desert Tears, Tequila Nights, and Single Slipper Size-7 on the Indian side, and the full Indonesian slate on the Southeast Asia side. he full body of production work is documented in our productions and portfolio.
Remakes and Adaptation
The remake and adaptation space is where Celluloid Pact occupies a genuinely distinctive position. We understand both the Indian and Indonesian production contexts well enough to navigate the full adaptation pipeline, from rights identification and negotiation through production and delivery. Keluarga Slamet is the clearest demonstration of what that looks like in practice: a culturally specific Indian story rebuilt for an Indonesian audience with the production rigour that cross-cultural adaptation actually requires.
On-Location Consulting
Our on-location consulting practice supports international productions that need territory expertise before they commit a crew and a camera to a specific place. The work covers location scouting and assessment, permit and compliance mapping, crew and fixer referrals, budget benchmarking, and the kind of ground-level knowledge that only comes from having actually produced in a territory.
Production Consulting
Beyond the production credits, Celluloid Pact provides consulting services to production companies, financiers, and distributors navigating cross-territory projects. This includes co-production structuring, territory assessment, rights valuation, and the strategic advice that helps a project find the right production partner in an unfamiliar market.
Why the Cross-Territory Model Works
The question we are asked most often, in one form or another, is why a production company would choose to operate across as many territories as Celluloid Pact does rather than deepening its position in a single market.
The answer is that the cross-territory model is not a choice made despite the complexity it creates, it is a choice made because of the advantages that complexity produces.
A production company that has worked in India, Indonesia, Jordan, and Tbilisi has a comparative knowledge base that a single-territory company simply cannot access. It knows what makes Indian production infrastructure distinctive because it has seen what Indonesian infrastructure looks like by comparison. It knows what international productions find surprising about Jordan because it has watched them encounter it. It knows which elements of a story travel and which do not because it has been in the room when the translation happens.
That comparative knowledge makes Celluloid Pact more useful to every client we work with, whether they are an Indian producer exploring the Indonesian remake market, an international production company looking for a line producer who understands both the logistics and the culture of a specific territory, or a financier trying to assess the production viability of a cross-territory co-production.
What We Are Building
The film industry is in a period of genuine structural change. The streaming platforms have altered the economics of production and distribution in ways that are still working themselves out. The Asian content market, driven by the global reach of Korean, Indian, and Indonesian storytelling, is attracting levels of international attention and investment that would have been difficult to predict a decade ago.
Celluloid Pact is positioned at the intersection of those changes. The remake and adaptation corridor between India and Southeast Asia is still in relatively early development. The MENA production market is expanding as regional governments invest in film infrastructure and international productions discover the territory. The demand for production expertise that crosses cultural and geographic boundaries is growing, not shrinking.
The work across two decades, from Quick Gun Murugun to Buya Hamka, is the clearest account of what that means in practice. You can explore it in full in our portfolio.
We are building a company that is designed to operate at that intersection, that has the production credits, the territory relationships, and the cross-cultural fluency to take a story from wherever it starts to wherever it needs to go.
That is the work. And it is work we are nowhere near finished with.
