Peddlers (film)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Peddlers is a 2012 Indian crime thriller directed by Vasan Bala. It stars Gulshan Devaiah, Nishikant Kamat, Kriti Malhotra, Nimrat Kaur, and Siddharth Menon.

Set in Mumbai, the film follows a group of destitute 20-year-olds who get pulled into the drug trade, and a young police officer who tracks them down.

Key people behind the film include writer-director Vasan Bala, and producers Anurag Kashyap, Guneet Monga, and Shahnaab Alam. The production companies are Sikhya Entertainment, Elle Driver, and AKFPL. Cinematography is by Siddharth Diwan, editing by Prerna Saigal, and the music is by Karan Kulkarni. The movie runs for 116 minutes.

Peddlers was screened in the Critics’ Week section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Eros International acquired the Indian distribution rights in May 2012, but the film did not get a theatrical release. In 2020, Bala and Monga asked Eros to release it on Eros Now, and the platform announced plans for new releases in 2021, but Peddlers was not released that year.

Innovative funding helped bring the film to life: producer Guneet Monga raised nearly ₹1 crore (about US$120,000) by posting the script on Facebook, about half of the film’s budget of ₹2 crore (US$240,000).

Reception notes: Hollywood Reporter’s Deborah Young praised the film’s action-packed pay-off in the final stretch, while Variety’s Jay Weissberg highlighted Bala’s emerging talent, with well-written characters and sharp dialogue, though some storylines take longer to develop.