Vipul Mehta

Carry On Kesar reached cinemas on 17 February 2017 and it is a strange thing to have made in the middle of a youth boom. Shyamji and Kesar Patel are an elderly childless couple in a small Gujarati town. A Paris based fashion designer turns up to learn Kesar's craft, the past comes back, and the couple decide to have a child at the age most couples are grandparents. It was Supriya Pathak Kapur's first Gujarati film, opposite Darshan Jariwala.

Eight months later came Best of Luck Laalu, written and directed by him for Coconut Motion Pictures with Sachin and Jigar on the songs. Pathak returned as Daksha Modi, a mother steering a grade A student through the SSC board exams while the boy is being pulled apart by everything a teenager is pulled apart by. Two releases in one year, both built on a parent, at a moment when the safest bet in Gujarati cinema was four friends and a car.

Chaal Jeevi Laiye! opened on 1 February 2019 with Siddharth Randeria as Bipin, Yash Soni as his workaholic son Aditya and Aarohi Patel as Ketki. Bipin is diagnosed with pontine glioma and asks to see the Ganga and Kedarnath before he dies. The unit shot in Haridwar, Chopta and Kedarnath. BookMyShow reported about Rs 44 lakh on day one and close to Rs 7 crore in the first week, and the trade analyst Komal Nahta called it the highest grossing Gujarati film, with a reported gross of roughly Rs 50 crore. Those figures are industry-reported and not audited.

The run is the part that has never been repeated. It played Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Canada and parts of Africa. It completed 50 weeks on 17 January 2020, was re-released with subtitles and extra shots on 31 January 2020, and entered its eighth year in cinemas on 1 February 2026. A film about a dying father did that, in an industry whose marketing had been aimed at people in their twenties for seven straight years.

In 2023 he directed Kanjoos Makhichoos for ZEE5, adapted from the Gujarati play Sajan Re Jhooth Mat Bolo, moved to Lucknow and given to Kunal Khemu, Shweta Tripathi and Piyush Mishra. A miser saves for years to send his parents on a pilgrimage, loses them in a flood, and then discovers the compensation has been eaten by middlemen. It was Raju Srivastava's last screen appearance.

A year later he did the harder version. Ole Aale released on 5 January 2024 in Marathi, written and directed by him, the same story as Chaal Jeevi Laiye! with Nana Patekar in Randeria's role, Siddharth Chandekar, Sayali Sanjeev and Makarand Anaspure, the same Uttarakhand locations and Sachin and Jigar again on the score. It collected about Rs 8.33 crore and took eight nominations at the Filmfare Awards Marathi 2025. Change the state, the cast, the language and the industry, hold only the script, and the thing still stands up.

Maharaj released on 21 June 2024, produced by Aditya Chopra under YRF Entertainment and directed by Siddharth P. Malhotra, with Junaid Khan making his debut opposite Jaideep Ahlawat. It is built on the Maharaj Libel Case of 1862 and Saurabh Shah's novel about it, and the writing credit reads Vipul Mehta and Sneha Desai. The Gujarat High Court stayed the original 14 June release after a plea from a Hindu group, and the film went to Netflix a week late.

So the man whose subject is the Gujarati family living room also wrote the most legally contested Gujarati story of the decade, for the largest studio in Hindi cinema, and it is a courtroom drama. Between those he kept the home slate running: Kehvatlal Parivar on 6 May 2022 and Bachu Ni Benpani on 27 August 2025, both written and directed by him, both for Rashmin Majithia. Nobody in this industry has moved between those two registers as often.