Actor and intimacy coach Akshay Jha has founded Cinema Salon, a curated, travelling cinema showcase designed as a global, experience-driven platform. Cinema Salon takes independent films beyond traditional distribution, creating intimate, ticketed screenings across cultural capitals worldwide. Akshay Jha shared that Cinema Salon aims to build a cross-border network for indie cinema. What is Cinema Salon? Cinema Salon introduces a new circulation model. Each showcase not only creates immersive audience experiences but also generates real audience data and sustained demand, strengthening a film’s market positioning and opening stronger pathways for OTT and distribution deals. It’s a format that extends both the cultural life and commercial value of independent films. In an interaction with HT, Akshay Jha spoke at length about the project, how it is modelled, and how it will be implemented to better position independent voices from India. (Excerpts) Akshay begins by saying that the idea of Cinema Salon evolved over time. “The first time this idea came to me, it was pretty much at a nascent stage where the idea was that the …