With cinema’s popularity at an all-time high in Mumbai, India, filmmakers continue to flock to the region to begin their careers. As noted in a recent Vogue India article, the New York Film Academy recently held its first two programs in Mumbai: the 8-week filmmaking workshop and the 4-week acting for film workshop.

“We have always seen aspiring filmmakers and actors from India come attend workshops in NYC or LA—we knew there was a great interest and hunger to tell stories coming from this region,” said NYFA President Michael Young to Vogue India.

NYFA Mumbai workshops are held at the Urmi Estate (95 Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel [West] Mumbai, Maharashtra 400 013, India). The Urmi Estate is a modern 41-story skyscraper located in the heart of the city.

“This is our 25th anniversary and we know that Indians are the number one producers of films—there is a lot of potential and extremely talented people in the country,” added Vice President and Head of NYFA Mumbai Kitty Koo.

Notable NYFA alumni from India include Imran Khan, Sana Saeed, Kangana Ranaut, Athiya Shetty. And Rakesh Varre, who recently played Setu Patti in the blockbuster sensation, “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion.”

As is the case with all of NYFA’s locations and workshops, the Mumbai filmmaking workshops focus on learning in a hands-on film environment where students have the opportunity to make a fully-realized final film.

The acting for film workshops provide students with a strong foundation of acting skills with a specific focus on the basic elements of the craft of acting, using Stanislavski’s System, scene study, and monologue work as starting points. Students also participate in courses aimed specifically at training the actor for the technical requirements of acting on a film set.

Students in Mumbai also have the opportunity to transfer to NYFA’s NYC, South Beach, or LA locations to continue their education.

Denise Meyers began her career in Los Angeles as a literary agent assistant at the William Morris Agency in 1982. While she knew she didn’t want to pursue the career of an agent, she soon realized that screenwriting was her true calling.

“I thought that since I’d watched hundreds of movies growing up, I understood what went in to a good screenplay,” said Meyers in an interview with the Black List. “I wasn’t a terrible writer, but I wasn’t a great writer either.”

After 12 years of exhausting her contacts with her material and getting nowhere fast, Meyers moved onto a different career as a gourd artist, but, at the end of the day, her heart wasn’t in it as much as screenwriting.

“I set a goal for myself to learn how to write screenplays the way they are supposed to be written, with no expectation that I would ever get any farther in the film business than I had ever been before,” said Meyers. “I wanted to master the art form, in the same way I taught myself how to work with gourds.”

Meyers took advantage of an 8-Week Screenwriting scholarship at the New York Film Academy Los Angeles, where she hoped to truly master the craft.

“I won an eight-week screenwriting scholarship to NYFA a few years ago, and the experience was invaluable,” she said. “I use everything I learned at NYFA in every script I have written since then, and it has helped elevate my career beyond what it was before.”

Since attending NYFA, Meyers has won a number of screenwriting competitions, including a spot on the Athena List (with a script she wrote at NYFA), the Atlanta Film Festival, Table Read My Screenplay Austin, and several others.

From there, she wrote a short screenplay called “The Dark of Night,” which won the grand prize at Table Read My Screenplay Austin in 2015.

“Denise Carlson, an instructor at NYFA, told me about a short script writing contest she had plans to participate in called the NYC Midnight Short Screenwriting Contest,” Meyers recalls. “Twelve hundred people from across the globe signed up to participate, so there were groups of 40 people each who were given a genre, a character and a setting. My group received the following prompts; suspense, a diner, and an unemployed man or woman. We had eight days to write 12 pages, then, if we survived each heat, we were given a new genre, character and setting. I came up with the idea almost immediately, though God knows where it came from. The story is set in 1930. A woman on her way to Chicago for a job interview seeks refuge in the diner where she encounters a waitress, a drifter, and a cop, each with dark and dangerous secret.”

Meyers gave the script to Robin Wright’s assistant and, before she knew it, she was getting a call from Wright who wanted to direct the film, along with some of her cast members from “House of Cards.” In fact, 80 crew members from “House of Cards” signed on to work on the film including the director of photography, Dave Dunlap, and costume designer, Jessica Wenger. Boris Maldin, the producer of “House of Cards,” loaned his cameras and equipment.

After that, Leslie Bibb, Sam Rockwell, Callie Thorne and Michael Godere signed on to act in the film for scale.

Meyer’s “The Dark of Night” recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The black and white film noir is about a woman seeking refuge from a storm who takes matters into her own hands when she encounters a drifter and a waitress at an isolated diner where everyone has a secret and nothing is what it seems.

Meyers says she just finished a one-hour pilot episode based on “The Dark of Night” that she is developing with TV producer Michelle Rubenstein. She also completed a new feature about Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney that she hopes to get in front of Brad Pitt, and is currently working on a World War II drama about a battle in the Pacific that only a handful of people know about. Finally, she’s working on a web series based on her experiences as an award-winning screenwriter who still fixes toilets for a living.