Meet Kaustubh “Vick” Singh | Independent Producer and Creative Executive, Obluda FIlms

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kaustubh “Vick” Singh and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kaustubh “Vick”, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Before even movies, I found the word Obluda (Czech for “Monster”) a fascinating word- it’s the kind of monster that engulfs you whole. We joke about it quite often, but it has a great mouthfeel when enunciated out loud. So when I came across this emerging idea to start my own company, while studying and producing films internationally, some of the most compelling stories are often the hardest to get made, and much like Obluda, they engulf you whole. Growing up as an Indian minority in Singapore and later working across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, I became increasingly interested in how culture, geography, and identity shape the stories we tell and the ones we overlook.

As a producer, and through my travels, I found myself drawn to filmmakers exploring communities and perspectives that rarely receive any mainstream media attention, especially tribal groups in remote parts of India (like the Santhals) or the Romani in North Macedonia. Obluda envisions a home for these stories. Rather than chasing trends, we focus on culturally specific narratives that can resonate universally. Whether that means preserving Cajun folklore in Louisiana, exploring queer identity in North Macedonia, or aging couples in rural Virginia, and even the daily challenges of the disabled community in America. This is now my life’s mission: documenting lives and communities that exist outside major cultural centers.

I truly believe Obluda is an attempt to build the kind of company I wished existed when I was starting: one that believes great cinema can come from anywhere, and that local, rural stories deserve a global audience.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
My life as a producer is dedicated to finding stories that the mainstream hasn’t figured out how to tell yet and then figuring out a way to tell them.

With NIKOLA, NIKOLA (2026), that meant spending two years getting a Macedonian queer coming-of-age film made on the ground in Skopje. Director Leon Ristov and I wrote grant applications until two in the morning for over a year, flew to Sarajevo to pitch at film markets, knocked on apartment doors at night scouting locations, and ultimately pulled off a five-day night shoot in November 2024 with an entirely local Macedonian crew, a feat previously rarely undertaken in the country. The film has since received support through the Sundance Ignite x Adobe Fellowship and the National Board of Review, and we hope to premiere the film later this year.

UNLIMITED, FOREVER AND EVER, NO MATTER WHAT, premiered at Slamdance 2026 this year, but the challenges of making it were monumental. Director Jayme Coveliers cast his own mother, the real-life inspiration for the character of Maggie, who lives with chronic pain, and decades of medication had affected her memory, making a conventional script impossible. We had to completely reimagine what a set looks like, building an entirely improvised process around her safety and her presence. I’m now proud to say that Unlimited is ultimately the most emotionally honest film I’ve been part of in my life, and the struggle of making it very much helped me better understand the struggle of Maggie.

And now there’s MALÁTE MELODY: my first feature, with director Apa Agbayani, whom I’ve been building toward this with for four years through our collaborations on several short films together shot on location in the Philippines. Set amid Manila’s fading 1980s disco scene, it excavates what Marcos’s Martial Law erased, shot entirely on VHS, backed by partners across the Philippines, the US, Europe, and Singapore.

Ren Guang, Jeff Lichetnstein and I have built Obluda as a home for stories grounded in specific communities but designed to travel internationally. Between us, our work has screened at Busan, Tribeca, Locarno, Slamdance, QCinema, and Palm Springs Shortfest.

We hate the word “content.” We believe the industry remains poorly equipped to understand global audiences, and we’re trying to close that gap. AS Bong Joon Ho said: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” These are our values, and we want to create cross-border collaborations, one step at a time. The path here was scrappy and frequently exhausting, but it means the world to us.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Honestly, a week isn’t enough. LA looks like one place on a map, but it’s really four or five different worlds depending on where you grew up and how you move through it. I spent a major amount of time in Orange County and moved up to East LA later on, so I skew toward the outer edges rather than the Sunset Strip scene.

Porto’s is the first stop, hands down. Guava cheese strudel, spinach feta empanada, and a mojito. Do it in that order. Then Sun Nong Dan in Koreatown for a late-night soup to recalibrate after drinking or clubbing in Silver Lake. Sweet Lady Jane for cake- there is no other.

Whether on the beach or on a boat. Laguna Beach all the way for waves and Schabarum Park for a proper hike. If the timing lines up, the cherry blossom festival there in spring is worth rearranging your schedule for.

Sadly i like roaming malls too. I frequent Century City and Arcadia malls, and going cafe hopping and hunting for photo booths between them is genuinely one of my favorite ways to spend a day. It sounds weird, but those are the moments I cherish the most, and I’m sure you will want to take these memories with you too.

Come evening, take them on a winding Mulholland Drive. Or just drive the I-5 toward Anaheim around 9 pm to catch the Disney fireworks going off, and you can watch them through the windshield without stopping. That’s a very specific SoCal experience that I don’t think exists anywhere else.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’m sure everyone you talk to must run into this problem quite frequently. There are far too many people to thank individually, honestly, but there are always a few who have a profound impact on everyone’s individual journey. I have moine too. My mother instilled in me a love of cinema at a young age. She taught me that movies are meant to be felt—to laugh loudly when something is funny and to cry when something moves you. That lesson has stayed with me throughout my life, even though she has since passed. Thank you, mommy.

Richard Peña expanded my understanding of what cinema could be beyond entertainment, introducing me to films and movements from around the world that fundamentally reshaped how I thought about storytelling. Lance Weiler challenged me to think about the future of media and audience engagement and how technology needs to be integrated into everyday life, while Alex Turner’s writing soothed my inner teenage soul.

I have had so many collaborators, filmmakers, and communities who trusted me with their stories. Leon, Jayme, Brynne, Kylie, Brenten, Ren, Jeff, and Apa, to name a few of my trusted collaborators. Thank you for trusting in me.

Producing is inherently lonely, but ultimately a collective endeavor. Every film I’ve worked on exists because of the leadership of the director, the effort of its crew members, the trust of the funders, the belief of the festival programmers, and the curiosity of the audiences who decided to watch it. Whatever minimal success I’ve had is really the result of being fortunate enough to learn from and work alongside people much more extraordinary than me.

Website: https://kaustubh.tv/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cawstub/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaustubh-vick-singh/

Twitter: https://www.x.com/in/cawstub/

Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8639545/

Image Credits
Pictures all belong to me. Taken by my phone or through my colleagues’ phones.