02 August,2026 07:42 AM IST | Mumbai | Junisha Dama
Vikrant Patankar
If you told a seven-year-old boy who made a DIY projector to screen anime clips onto a chawl wall that he would receive an international filmmaking grant, he might have just adjusted his lens. But for Vikrant Patankar, serendipity has always been the co-pilot.
Raised in a modest Mumbai chawl where his parents worked in healthcare, Patankar's entry into cinema wasn't born out of film sets or privileged connections. It started at age four, when a trip to a cinema hall left him spellbound by the dark room, the light strips, and the smell of popcorn.
Formal film schools were a steep 20 lakh rupees a year - a sum far beyond his family's reality - Patankar closed the browser tab and opted for engineering, after securing a tuition-fee waiver thanks to a government scheme.
Yet, art had other plans for Patankar, and filmmaking kept reappearing in his life. During grueling three-hour engineering exams, Patankar would finish his papers in an hour and spend the remaining two scribbling screenplays in the canteen. "La La Land was that turning point in 2019 when I was around 18 years old," Patankar recalls, marking the moment he truly came of age as an aspiring filmmaker.
Instead of navigating the traditional, often uninspiring corridors of Bollywood - where he says he has watched peers struggle to raise even a lakh rupees to make a film - Patankar's path swerved through the digital age.
He built a YouTube channel to 20,000 subscribers when he was 13, earning his first dollar in 2013. He later worked remotely as a product designer for studios in Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, and went viral on X with a cinematic video essay titled, For the Love of Interstellar. That virality landed him a role as a founding filmmaker at the US-based AI startup Composio, bringing him into the fast-paced tech ecosystems of Bangalore and San Francisco.
Now, Patankar is channeling that unconventional route into his debut directorial coming-of-age short film, Summer Montage. Backed by the Emergent Ventures Fellowship, the project thrives on outside-the-industry funding.
"It's such a trust based funding system that my Emergent Ventures selection happened over a WhatsApp call," Patankar says. "That's why I love the tech space or the startup space in general, because fundraising in a space like this is so quick... they just trust you that you're going to do good with that money".
Summer Montage draws raw inspiration from Patankar's own childhood: a delicate, platonic look at a five-year-old boy who develops a small crush on his benchmate, only for her to abruptly disappear before he can articulate his feelings of loss.
Eschewing the safety net of generative AI for imaging, Patankar is committed to shooting entirely on-camera with practical actors. "I feel like this is the best opportunity for me to present my case against generative AI. This is all going to be shot on camera, all practical, real actors, no AI slop," he says. With production slated around Diwali and a festival run planned for early next year, alongside a feature documentary to be released on his Youtube channel - titled Old Dream: For the Love of Dune arriving this December - Patankar believes today's indie filmmakers must adopt the mindset of an entrepreneur.
"You look at any great artist in this world, they always had an entrepreneurial instinct," Patankar reflects. "In today's world, you can't just stay silent and produce good movies and expect the world is going to run after you. You're just supposed to, or rather, you do not have any option but to run after the things that you want. Run after it very vocally, in a very audacious way with insane audacity".
It is a philosophy born from breaking out of traditional echo chambers. Patankar urges young creators, especially those growing up in environments like the Mumbai chawls, to look beyond conventional formulas and explore the world outside the film industry. "Even if you are simply a consumer of films, put that out there on the Internet," he advises.
But would he still choose this unconventional path - A YouTube channel at 13, an engineering degree, a product design job, and a commercials filmmaker for an AI startup as the road to getting funding for his debut? Patankar says he would do it all over again.
