Mikhil Musale

In 2010 three men met at an international film festival in Ahmedabad and started a production company. Musale, Abhishek Jain and Anish Shah called it CineMan Productions. Shah left later. The first thing it made was Jain's Kevi Rite Jaish in 2012, the film credited with restarting Gujarati cinema, and then Bey Yaar in 2014. Musale worked as assistant director on both.

Six years passed before he directed anything under his own name. In an industry where everyone was rushing to claim a chair while the boom was open, he spent the boom learning the room from the second seat.

Wrong Side Raju is drawn from a hit and run case in Ahmedabad in 2013. Raju is a driver by day and a bootlegger by night in a state under prohibition, chauffeuring the son of an industrialist, and the film turns into a courtroom procedural about who gets to be guilty when one family can afford a lawyer and the other cannot. Musale and Karan Vyas wrote the first draft. Niren Bhatt, who had written Bey Yaar, was brought in after.

In February 2016 Abhishek Jain announced that CineMan would co-produce three Gujarati films with Anurag Kashyap's Phantom Films, and this was the first out of that deal. It was shot across sixty locations in Ahmedabad, including H. L. College of Commerce and Gujarat National Law University. Sachin and Jigar wrote the music and got Arijit Singh to sing Satrangi Re, his first song in Gujarati, which crossed a million views on YouTube in twenty four hours.

It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati at the 64th ceremony, which was the headline at the time and is now the least interesting thing about it. Follow the people instead. Pratik Gandhi played Raju; four years later he played Harshad Mehta in Scam 1992 and became the most talked about actor on Indian streaming. Niren Bhatt, the co-writer, went on to the Maddock horror comedy universe and wrote Stree 2, one of the highest grossing Hindi films of all time.

Musale himself went to Maddock. Dinesh Vijan produced his Hindi debut Made in China in 2019 with Rajkummar Rao, Mouni Roy and Boman Irani, and then Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video in 2023 with Nimrat Kaur and Radhika Madan. Three careers cleared the state border out of one Gujarati film. No other title in this industry has that hit rate.

Gujarati cinema measures its directors by count. Krishnadev Yagnik has eight features, Vijaygiri Bava four, Viral Shah three. Musale has one, and he has not returned to the language in the ten years since. His own Instagram biography lists three films and one description of himself: National Award film maker, ads and feature films.

The uncomfortable reading is that a Gujarati debut works best as a portfolio piece, and that the industry keeps producing calling cards for Mumbai rather than careers at home. The generous reading is that he proved the calling card was possible at all, and that Abhishek Shah and Krishnadev Yagnik built at home on the credibility this film bought. Both readings are true, and both start at the same 2016 release.