MUMBAI : Award winning Indian independent filmmaker Prataya Saha and AI generative artist Ankush Deva are expanding the Kaliyug Rising universe with the release of Kaliyug Rising: The Revenge, the second instalment in their emerging AI-driven action franchise.
The film follows the success of Kaliyug Rising: The Beginning, which was among Higgsfield’s Global Top 10 from more than 9,000 submissions representing over 100 countries, and the only Indian film to be on that list.
What began as an experiment in Indian AI filmmaking has now evolved into something considerably more ambitious: the early blueprint for a fully developed realistic hybrid AI feature film.
AN ACTION WORLD THAT COULD ONLY COME FROM INDIA
While global AI filmmaking has increasingly experimented with science fiction, fantasy and futuristic worlds, Kaliyug Rising takes a different route. Its world is recognisably Indian.
In The Revenge, the protagonist street fighter, Raj arrives at a dystopian hospital desperate to save his critically ill wife. But the hospital is far removed from the conventional idea of a place of healing.
Behind its corridors exists another business, an underground network involved in the illegal trade of human organs. His wife’s survival has effectively become a transaction. However, when the criminals come looking for Raj, the hospital becomes a battlefield.
The films draw from the idea of Kaliyug, the age of moral and social decline in Indian philosophical and mythological traditions but place that mythology inside a contemporary criminal ecosystem.
Instead of creating another fantasy interpretation of Indian mythology, writer and director, Saha’s approach is to ask what these archetypes might look like if they existed inside the society we recognise today. It is a test on whether an Indian story, rather than simply an impressive AI visual experiment, could compete within an emerging global AI filmmaking ecosystem.
The result is a world of illegal fight circuits, corrupt elites, hand-to-hand combat, pursuit, conspiracy, mythological undertones, hospitals, street violence and ordinary people pushed into extraordinary circumstances. The Revenge pushes that world further.
THE AI FILMMAKING EXPERIMENT GETS BIGGER
Kaliyug Rising: The Revenge has been created through an AI-centric production process, with Saha writing and directing and Deva leading the generative visual work and Deep Patel on the edit.
According to Saha, the film was developed from script to video using Seedance 2.5, with asset generation through Cinema Studio, over six days and nights with a five-person core team with a production budget of less than 1,000 Dollars.
That production model points towards the larger ambition behind the franchise.
Rather than treating AI as a replacement for filmmaking, the team is experimenting with a human-AI hybrid filmmaking model in which conventional filmmaking principles, screenplay, direction, visual language, editing, sound and performance, remain central while generative technology expands what a small independent team can physically create.
For Kaliyug Rising, this has particular significance.
A large-scale underground Indian fight world, multiple action environments, elaborate criminal locations and mythological influences would traditionally require substantial physical production resources unthinkable for an Indian independent filmmaker.
AI democratizes the equation!
Director, Prataya Saha says, “Kaliyug Rising is, in many ways, a testimony to how AI is democratizing filmmaking. As an independent filmmaker we could only dream of building a dystopian world of action without the help of large studios and large teams and humungous production budgets but now AI is making that dream a possibility. It means that a filmmaker sitting in a remote part of the world can imagine something on this scale. It changes things, especially for filmmakers from emerging economies.”
AI Artist Ankush Deva says, “When first part Kaliyug Rising began AI was still a relatively unexplored creative medium but with the sequel it was more intentional. We can take a script and move from words to visual references, generate characters and environments and use script-to-video workflows to turn those ideas into moving videos, allowing us to imagine and build a world far beyond the limitations of a conventional independent production.”
Editor, Deep Patel says, “In live action, you shape what you capture; with AI, you sometimes have to build what doesn’t exist. The challenge is maintaining consistency across characters, environments, movement and hundreds of generated frames.”
THE NEXT DESTINATION: A HYBRID AI FEATURE FILM: THE NEXT CHAPTER OF INDIAN AI CINEMA
The ultimate ambition behind Kaliyug Rising extends much beyond.
The films are being conceived as seeds for a much larger hybrid AI feature film and cinematic universe.
Kaliyug Rising: The Beginning established Raj and the underground fight world.
The Revenge expands the criminal ecosystem and raises the scale of the action, sitting at an unusual intersection: Indian mythology, underground action cinema, dystopian crime and generative AI.
It is to ask what happens when an Indian filmmaker uses the technology to create worlds that have traditionally been difficult to produce at an independent scale. The universe is only beginning to rise.
