It takes a village to make a film.

Filmmaking is often romanticised as the domain of singular visionaries — actors and auteurs whose names become shorthand for style, technique, and sometimes even an entire era. But the reality of cinema, from its earliest days till now, has always been more entangled and collective. It takes a village to make a film — and throughout cinema’s long and meandering history, it has been the collective output of a vast, independent ecosystem of people whose skills and sensibilities converge to create something truly magical, something none of them could have imagined making alone.

For Smriti Kiran — artistic director, independent creator, and founder of Polka Dots Lightbox, a Mumbai-based consultancy dedicated to developing and creatively steering narratives for film and series — the death of veteran film producer and production manager Dipa De Motwane on 26 December 2025 marked a decisive moment when this truth had to be told publicly. Motwane was one of India’s senior-most producers — she worked in the film industry for over five decades. “Yet you will find barely five interviews with her online,” Smriti says. Like many producers, first ADs, technicians, sound engineers, gaffers, and a myriad others who make movies possible, she worked behind the scenes and away from the warm glow of the limelight. “I think this is a travesty,” Smriti says.

“A lot of my own work is not really mine to claim in a traditional sense”, Smriti says. “Invisible and unquantifiable are the ways it is not for roles that are either not on camera or considered at the centre of creation. Their legacies are wiped out, misrepresented, or invisibilised (...) Always a part of someone else’s narrative, but never at the centre of the mainstream.”

In 2026, Smriti is partnering with Homegrown to course-correct this imbalance through ‘The B-IG List’ — a new editorial series spotlighting the people whose craft, care, and grit keep the film industry alive. Each episode will foreground those who build cinema’s invisible architecture: the editors, first ADs, producers, costume teams, VFX supervisors, sound engineers, and many more, without whom no story could exist on screen.

The first episode profiles Ananya Rane, Mumbai-based producer and first assistant director whose career spans both Indian and international filmmaking. Rane has worked with directors such as Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, Sam Hargrave, and Garth Davis, contributing to projects including the Oscar-winning ‘Life of Pi’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, as well as global productions such as ‘Extraction’ and ‘Lion’. In India, she has served as Line Producer for Roy Kapur Films on ‘Pippa’ and as Executive Producer on Sooni Taraporevala’s acclaimed web series ‘Waack Girls’ for Amazon India. Her journey, spanning blockbuster sets, cross-cultural collaborations, and the tough, underrated labour of holding productions together, sets the tone for what ‘The B-IG List’ aims to document: the people whose almost invisible craft transforms logistical chaos into the magic that is cinema.

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