He Sold His Startup To Amazon. Now He's Made Ghich Pich, A 90s Coming-of-Age Film Rated 9.7 on IMDb
A former techie makes Ghich Pich, a heartfelt coming-of-age film which took him five years and is rated 9.7 on IMDb. A debut worth watching.
By Minal Rudra
Published : July 29, 2025 at 1:21 PM IST
One doesn't realise how beautiful those afternoon walks back home from school were until life becomes all about commuting, deadlines, Zoom calls and EMIs.
Adolescence is when identity begins to take shape. The teenage years are when we first start to feel a sense of self, taste independence, and experience intense emotions in form of first love, first heartbreak, first rebellion, and the first glimpse of freedom.
That’s also why films like Ghich Pich, set in the late ’90s, hit so hard. They remind us of a time when life moved slower. When every heartbreak felt like the end of the world, and yet somehow, we survived.
There's something about memory. The older we get, the more we return to it. And perhaps that’s what inspired Ankur Singla, a former tech entrepreneur and lawyer who once built and sold a Sequoia-backed company to Amazon to become a filmmaker. His debut feature, Ghich Pich premiered at the Cinevesture International Film Festival (CIFF), where it played to packed houses earlier this year. The film is already turning heads with a 9.7 rating on IMDb.
He founded Barsaati Films, a name drawn from Delhi’s quintessential top-floor starter apartments. “I started my career out of a barsaati. A rundown top floor room with a little veranda. That space was full of possibility for those who come to the city with dreams. So I thought, why not make films that come from that world too?” he says.
But how does someone whose life was all about courtroom arguments and budling startups end up chasing emotion through a lens?
"I always had a thing for films," Ankur says, "Even in college, I ran a film club. We’d watch French New Wave, Italian Neo-Realism, the classics. But I never really thought filmmaking was something I could do. I mean, come on, it felt like something only other people did. Then in 2020, COVID happened. Like a lot of people, I also felt a shift. There was a churn within. I had built a company, sold it, done all that. Now I wanted to create. My wife noticed it too and encouraged me to explore. So I enrolled in a cinematography class. Then a filmmaking course. It was like a mini-FTII on weekends. Making short films, writing, editing... a total crash course. And I made some truly horrible short films in the beginning," he admits with a laugh.
"I realised that skills don’t transfer like that. I was like a 20-year-old intern again, fumbling and making lots of mistakes. But then I thought, instead of more shorts, let me try writing a feature. And I remembered what Mira Nair had said in this online MasterClass I took. She said, ‘If you don’t tell your story, who will?’ And also ‘Are you the best person to tell this story?’ That really hit me. I realised, I know Chandigarh. I know these boys. I’ve been these boys. Maybe I am the best person to tell this story."
And so began the journey of Ghich Pich. The film's title, loosely translating to 'a tangle' or 'emotional mess', captures the emotional whirlwind that adolescence often is. The story is about three boys growing up in Chandigarh, but more so, growing away from their fathers. The universality of strained father-son relationships is brought out with warmth, humour, and sharp emotions.
The three central boys Gurpreet (Kabir Nanda), Anurag (Aryan Rana), and Gaurav (Shhivam Kakar) carry a piece of Ankur. "I wrote all three of them,” he says. "There’s a bit of me in each one. One has the rebellion, one the vulnerability, and one has the pressure to perform. So writing them was like splitting myself in three."
"I started with anecdotes. But the screenplay demands precision... almost like engineering. Over nearly a year and a half of rewriting, the film moved from memories to meaning on paper. You polish it again and again and it starts moving away from what actually happened, and towards what needs to happen for it to resonate with audience."
Chandigarh, in Ghich Pich, is more than a backdrop. "As kids growing up there, we didn’t know anything about Le Corbusier or architecture or any of that. It was just home. Only much later, when I started learning about cinema and aesthetics, did I realise the visual potential of Chandigarh. I went on an architectural walk with a friend from NID Ahmedabad. He showed me the city through a whole new lens. Suddenly, I saw poetry in those straight lines, in the way shadows fall, in the silence of glass buildings."
Unlike most films that pick the usual Rock Garden–Sukhna Lake circuit for Chandigarh, Ankur made a conscious choice to explore lesser-seen spaces. "We said, let’s only shoot in places that my characters would actually have access to. That meant avoiding glossy locations that didn’t match their social context. We shot in my school, in old neighbourhoods, in rundown buildings. There’s a glass house we used in the film which became this key spot where the boys hang out, fight, chill."
Capture 90s era in 2025 was one of the biggest challenges, says Ankur. "You won’t believe the kind of detail we had to chase. In the 90s, all streetlights were yellow. Now they’re white LEDs. Just finding a street that still had yellow lighting was like a treasure hunt. And budgets were tight. We couldn’t change bulbs or VFX it later. We just had to find the right spot and shoot."
Casting was another leap of faith. Ankur chose first-time actors for the three boys and it paid off as much of the film’s magic comes from these young trio.
"I knew I had to get out of the way and just let them be. So, I brought in an acting coach from NSD to work with them for a month before we started shooting. That made a huge difference. I knew from my terrible short films that you can’t get good performances on set just like that. You have to prepare them."
The film also stars Geeta Agrawal Sharma (Laapatta Ladies, 12th Fail) and Naresh Bansal (Made in Heaven, Balika Vadhu) in pivotal roles. Among the film’s veteran actors was the late Nitesh Pandey (Khosla Ka Ghosla, Anupama), in what tragically became his last performance. Ankur lights up when he speaks of him. "He was such a thinking actor. There’s a scene where he takes off his partner’s specs. It was not in the script. He told me, ‘Can I try something?’ He did it, and it planted a subtle clue about his sexuality. It made the later reveal land with emotional weight. His understanding of emotional charge of scenes without spelling it out was amazing. That was his craft."
The film was shot in a single 23-day schedule in February 2023, but editing took almost two years.
"We took one and a half years to edit. It was a beast. Because we realised, this is neither an indie film nor a proper mainstream film. And that’s what confused people at first. It’s not slow, it’s not loud. It just is. That meant we had to work extra hard in the edit to get the tone right. The film had three protagonists. If even one track felt weak, the whole narrative would collapse. So we had to sculpt it like a piece of stone and cutting away anything that didn’t serve the theme. And only during the edit did the father-son theme truly emerge as the spine of the film."
Ankur feels that filmmaking demanded sheer stamina. "Writer-director aside, I was the producer too. Sleeping 3-4 hours a night for almost a month, then having to be creative and decisive on set...it’s exhausting. But there’s a kind of madness to it that’s also addictive."
Despite the long and emotionally taxing five-year process, Ankur never lost faith. "Of course it was hard. And filmmaking is personal in a way tech never was. In tech, you can iterate, fix bugs. Here, when someone doesn’t like your work, it feels like personal attack. But never felt like quitting. We just kept working."
The Cinevesture screenings this year were a breakthrough. "I didn’t even watch the first show as I was too nervous. Just stood downstairs ushering people in. But the second show... I watched it. And I thought, wow, this has been four and a half years of our life. And it was worth it."
As for what’s next, Ankur isn’t in a rush. "No new projects right now. That’s another thing I’ve learnt...you can’t move on to the next film while your current one is still halfway through release and distribution. You owe it to your film to stay with it till the end. And then maybe, take a short break. Breathe. Because indie films, they take a toll. They’re a full life project," he concludes.
Ghich Pich hits big screens on August 8.
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