Emmy-nominated actress and producer Issa Rae will incorporate the Hindi cinema of 1980s for her latest project. She will develop Badmash, a Bollywood-meets-mafia film under her banner ColorCreative with Shivani Rawat of ShivHans Pictures, according to a report in The Hollywood Reporter.
Sneha Koorse, a writer on the Netflix show Umbrella Academy, pitched the film as a dark comedy noir that deals with the issue of gangsters laundering their drug money through Hindi films.
The news report states the English-language film will have a South Asian ensemble cast and "will adopt the taut dialogue, tangled character webs and complex romance of the crime genre set against the backdrop of 1980s Mumbai at the height of the underworld’s power in the film industry".
Rae told The Hollywood Reporter, "We started ColorCreative to give a platform to stories that the traditional studio system tends to overlook, stories like Badmash."
She is both co-creator and star of HBO's Insecure. Her upcoming film roles include The Photograph (2020) with Lakeith Stanfield and The Lovebirds (2020) with Pakistani-American Kumail Nanjiani.