Lena Khan (“Flora and Ulysses”) is set to direct the Bollywood comedy “Best of the Best.”
The Amazon Studios project, formerly titled “For the Culture,” chronicles the highly competitive world of collegiate Bollywood dance competitions. Comedian Hasan Minhaj, best known for his Peabody Award-winning Netflix series “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” wrote the project with Prashanth Venkataramanujam to launch their production company, 186K Films. Minhaj will also play a role in the film, which Rideback’s Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich are producing, and Ryan Halprin is executive producing.
Additionally, Khan is attached to direct an adaptation of the classic children’s book “The Cricket in Times Square” — about a cricket from New Jersey named Chester who lands in Manhattan after accidentally getting trapped in a picnic basket — for Spyglass. That project remains in development.
Born in Canada and raised in Rancho Cucamonga, California, Khan graduated from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. She’s specialized in comedy, starting with her feature debut, the 2017 indie “The Tiger Hunter,” which starred Dani Pudi as an Indian engineer who immigrates to America in a story loosely based on Khan’s own father. In 2019, she was hired to direct the Disney+ feature “Flora and Ulysses” with Alyson Hannigan and Ben Schwartz, based on the novel of the same name about a young girl and her sentient, super-powered squirrel.
Khan also recently served as an executive producer on the documentary short film “Stranger at the Gate,” which Malala Yousafzai boarded as an EP in January in advance of the film’s Oscar nomination.
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