MUMBAI: Cause Entertainment is co-producing its maiden film, A First Class Man, with UK-based Picture Palace Productions.

Cause Entertainment, a fund established to invest in socially conscious movies, is fully financing the mid-budget English language film. Picture Palace Productions will provide production help for the movie which is being partly shot in the UK.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, the movie is based on the life of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Based on the play of the same name by David Freeman, the film follows the life of Tamil Nadu-born Ramanujan (1887-1920), who had no formal education but devised mathematical theories that were years ahead of his time. He was invited to Cambridge by mathematician G.H. Hardy who was astounded by the content of Ramanujan‘s Note books when he posted them from Chennai.

Spottiswoode has directed films like And The Band Played On, Air America and the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. His last feature, The Children of Huang Shi, was a Sino-Australian co-production that filmed in China starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Radha Mitchell.

Ramanujan has already been the subject of several books and plays but this project marks the first time his life has been depicted in a feature film. The film will also be used as a platform for social action initiatives in the area of education that are being devised by the team at Cause Entertainment.

The film, now in the pre-production stage, will start rolling in May. While the first schedule will take place in the UK, the star cast and crew will return to India for the second schedule.

Cause Entertainment‘s Vicky Dhir is one of the three principal directors of the fund along with Aditya Mehta and former Sony executive Uday Singh. The fund also has two advisory boards - a creative board including filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap, Prahlad Khakkar and Aparna Sen, and a corporate board including executives such as Alex Kuruvilla, Sony Entertainment CEO Manjit Singh, Rajat Jain and Bobby Bedi.