India has the biggest talent pool in the audio-visual sector, including artificial intelligence and virtual reality, India’s junior Minister for Information and Broadcasting L Murugan said on Sunday at Cannes, urging global filmmakers to explore the country’s lucrative movie market.

Speaking at the Cannes Next, a business event on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival in France, Murugan pitched India as a great land of story-tellers with the biggest pool of technical and software talent, which play a crucial role in movie making.

“Audio-visual is the area where technology marries art,” he said, expressing happiness that five Indian start-ups were pitching their expertise in dubbing, automated solutions for lip-synchronisation and gaming at the event, a PTI report said.

Prithvi Jain, the co-founder and CEO of VerboLabs, a sub-titling service in major languages of the world, made a pitch before entertainment industry representatives at the Cannes Next.

Jyoti Joshi, co-founder of Kroop AI, said her start-up specialised in generating high-quality videos with just audio or text as input, which enables clients to reach customers with hyper personalised videos created using artificial intelligence.

Roots Video, a streaming platform for under-represented Indian languages, and Gamitronics, which specialises in building electronic toys and enterprise robots, also pitched their skills at the business event.

Aditi Shrivastava, Co-founder & CEO of Pocket Aces, said her venture was trying to build India’s biggest online media conglomerate.

“The beauty and aesthetics of movies are accentuated and given superlative effects by the excellent audio and visuals,” Murugan said, commending the organisers of the Cannes Next for giving a platform to the budding talent and start-ups in the field of audio-visuals and movie making.

“I hope their (five start-ups) ideas will influence producers, financiers and business enthusiasts, and get them a wider platform for their product. I am happy that they are moving from the local stage to the global stage,” Murugan was quoted as saying in an official statement.

He said new technologies of blockchain, deep learning, AI and VR are making huge inroads in movie making. “Content translations, effective sub-titling are breaking down the barriers once posed by languages,” he said.

Murugan said with more than 2,000 films being produced in different languages every year, India was the largest producer of films and its 1.3 billion population offered one of the biggest and lucrative movie markets.