She doesn’t have the ravishing looks of an Aishwarya Rai nor has she had a godfather or a megabucks banner launching her; but talent she has, just waiting to be tapped. Her debut was synonymous with her film — Chupke Se…and though Megha, the bubbly, middle class Maharashrian girl, may be a memory now, Masumi Makhija has made her international debut with Tor Zum Himmel/Gate to Heaven with Veit Helmer, a German director. The film is a cross-cultural love story between a luggage handler, Alexej (Russian actor, Valera Nikolaev), and Nisha (Masumi), a cleaning woman from India.

At the film’s world premiere at the Hof Film Festival, in Germany, the audience and the media, according to the producer Ulf Israel, ‘were curious about the Indische princess’. Gate to Heaven released commercially in Germany and Europe during December 2003, and will be among the roster at the Berlin Film Festival in early 2004.

Closer home, Masumi has two more films awaiting release: Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool and 6:16 An Ode To Love for cinematographer Madhu Ambat. Earlier in the year, she was a presenter at the European Film Awards, interacting with celebrated directors like Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders and Pedro Almodvar.

Her commercial coup, however, is Mahesh Manjrekar’s Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav, a hardcore caper where she is the only female lead pitted against Suniel Shetty, Mahesh Manjrekar and Johny Lever.