LONG before 42-year-old Arish Sirkissoon became LX Seth, before the films, the premieres, the awards and the ambition to build an industry around him, there was a boy in Durban who wanted something that sounded almost absurd to the people around him.
He wanted to be a pop star. Not a singer. A pop star.
He said so out loud and people laughed.
“I remember making my ambitions public and telling people that I wanted to be a pop star. I was ridiculed for it. A lot of people laughed at the idea and probably thought it was an unrealistic dream.”
He was growing up on North Coast Road in Durban North, where almost his entire family lived.
His parents, Anitha and Angath Sirkissoon, had a younger daughter, Aileen, and a son whose imagination was already considerably bigger than the world around him.
“There weren’t many Indian celebrities or artists who were mainstream figures that I could look up to,” he recalled.
Bollywood provided some of the great stars like Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, but the idea that an Indian boy from Durban could create a mainstream entertainment career of his own was another matter.
He attended Avoca Secondary, a public school that he remembers as “basic in its facilities but rich in the quality of its teachers”.
By 21, Sirkissoon was already putting money where his ambition was. While other young people might have been thinking about the sort of party they wanted for a milestone birthday, he had something else in mind.
“When I was turning 21, I told my parents that I didn't want a big 21st birthday party. Instead, I wanted the money. I wanted to use it to register a company and start my first business, which was Fusion Records.”
His parents still gave him a smaller celebration, but they agreed to let him put the money into the business.
“That probably tells you a lot about the kind of ambition I had even at that age.”
That ambition was never entirely separate from the expectations his parents had for him. They wanted him to get an education to fall back on, but they did not ask him to abandon the creative ambitions that had taken hold so early.
“They've always been supportive. I'm not going to sit here and say they never had doubts, because of course they did. But I don't think there was ever a conversation where they said, ‘Don't do it.’ Their attitude was more, ‘As long as you're continuing your education and building yourself academically, go and pursue your dreams’.’”
After school, he studied for a Bachelor of Social Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, followed by an honours degree in psychology through UNISA. He later completed a Master of Business Administration through MANCOSA.
“I didn't formally study film. My Bachelor of Social Science did have a drama component, but I never went to film school in the traditional sense. Instead, I studied the greats.”
He watched the work of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and studied producers such as Jerry Bruckheimer, absorbing the mechanics of filmmaking as much as the finished product.
“In many ways, I created my own film school by learning from the best.”
Even his name would eventually become part of that creation.
The name LX Seth came from a traditional tree connected to his family’s ancestral home in India. There was a carving on the tree, and Sirkissoon took inspiration from it, eventually transforming that connection into the stage name by which he would become known.
By then, music was already taking up a large part of his life. He built a recording studio in a small Wendy house outside his family home, turning an ordinary structure into a place where he could work late into the night.
His sister, Aileen, became an accidental part of the process, listening to recordings while trying to sleep and eventually becoming one of the first people whose opinion he trusted.
“It got to the point where I'd be recording at two or three in the morning and she couldn't sleep. She became this unofficial early critic of my music.”
Eventually, the boy who had been laughed at got his pop-star moment.
His first album, Off the Hook, was signed to T-Series in India after Dharam Sewraj, then with Universal Music, heard the album and sent it to the Indian company. The music videos began appearing on MTV and Channel O, and the number-one singles followed.
“We had music videos playing across platforms such as MTV and Channel O, and I had number-one singles.”
For a while, the dream looked exactly as he had imagined it. But the music business was changing rapidly, with Napster and LimeWire making it increasingly easy to share music illegally, while CD ripping and other forms of digital piracy began undermining the traditional business of selling recorded music. For Sirkissoon, the disruption eventually became an unexpected route into another part of the entertainment industry.
“In a strange way, that change pushed me towards film. I initially started dubbing foreign films into English and scoring films. But I also started thinking about storytelling, production, sound, visuals and the creative process as a whole.”
Film had once seemed like an industry that belonged to other people, but the more he worked around it, the less inaccessible it became.
“I started seeing film as something that was no longer unattainable.”
He did not want simply to participate in someone else’s production. He wanted to understand the entire process and eventually control the way his own stories were told.
“I wanted to write it, produce it and direct it because I had a very specific vision of how I wanted to tell stories.”
That interest in film had started much earlier, when James Bond gave him an early introduction to the combination of action, comedy, suspense and character that could hold an audience. Horror offered another kind of fascination, particularly the work of Wes Craven, whose films frightened him while making him curious about how that fear had been created in the first place.
“Wes Craven's work really affected me when I was young. A Nightmare on Elm Street genuinely terrified me, but at the same time, it intrigued me.”
He also gravitated towards films such as Scream, The Blair Witch Project and I Know What You Did Last Summer, developing an interest in psychological thrillers and horror that would eventually find its way into his own work.
His first major film project was Tokoloshe: The Calling, made in 2020. Sirkissoon wrote it, produced it, scored it and edited it, although he did not direct. The film was deliberately ambiguous, leaving audiences to make sense of what had happened.
“One of the biggest questions I still get asked to this day is, ‘What actually happened at the end?’ That was intentional.”
The film became one of the early South African productions to appear on Prime Video, but its release coincided with the arrival of Covid-19, which brought much of the film industry to a standstill. Around that time, the people working with Sirkissoon were telling him that the next step should be his own move into directing.
He took that advice. The Castle became his directing debut in 2022, followed by You’re Next, a psychological thriller, in 2023. Then came Highway Sheila: Resurrection in 2024, a project on which he took an even more hands-on role, writing, directing and producing the film.
It spent eight weeks in cinemas and attracted about 20,000 people, while two versions released on YouTube later accumulated about 100,000 views.
“I think that film really cemented me as a serious player in the industry.”
By 2025, his work had moved into documentary filmmaking with The Bengal Tiger: The Rajbansi Story, a film he wanted to make because he believed the story of its subject deserved to be preserved.
“I wanted to create a documentary about a man who was a household name in South Africa and whose story deserved to be preserved for future generations — to understand what he did, what he achieved and how he achieved it.”
He also established the LX Seth Academy in association with Nu Metro Cinema.
Sirkissoon is conscious of the relatively small number of prominent Indian South African filmmakers, but the academy is not intended only for young people. He wants to create opportunities for people who may have spent years outside the entertainment industry and now want to find a way into it, while giving aspiring filmmakers practical experience rather than simply another qualification to put on a CV.
“I don't want students to simply leave with a certificate. I want them to leave with experience and something they can actually show the industry.”
He believes that if you're a creative, you have to diversify your brand.
That means filmmaking sits alongside the academy, producing projects for other people, his podcast, Behind the Brand: The LX Seth Podcast, and The LX Factor Magazine. Music remains part of his work too; he still scores his films and says his latest film is entirely composed and scored by him.
“You can't simply do one thing and expect to survive. I've been doing this since I was 14, and I'm still building.”
That may explain why, when asked what advice he would give the younger version of himself, Sirkissoon does not offer a long list of lessons learned or regrets avoided. His answer is simple.
“Keep moving.”
He says the industry comes with its share of deflating moments, but his instinct has always been to keep going rather than spend too much time looking backwards.
His ambitions have certainly changed since the boy on North Coast Road announced that he wanted to be a pop star. Today, he wants to be remembered as one of the great filmmakers to emerge from South Africa.
“I also want to be remembered as someone who championed young talent. You don't have to start with millions. You don't have to come from the biggest institution. You don't have to have everything figured out.
“You can start with almost nothing, keep moving, learn along the way, build your skills, surround yourself with the right people and eventually create something much bigger than where you started.”
There is already another chapter waiting.
Highway Sheila 2 is due for release on December 4, while other projects include a documentary about businessman Vivian Reddy; Love Has No Boundaries based on specialist dermatologist Dr Raj Singh's book of the same title; and a reality television project.
Away from the cameras, scripts and business meetings, Sirkissoon describes himself as something of a loner, happiest with a small circle around him.
He watches horror and psychological thrillers, follows true-crime documentaries and has even found himself drawn back to animation through X-Men ’97. Sirkissoon enjoys cooking, plays Fortnite on his PS5, listens to music and, perhaps unsurprisingly, still finds himself thinking about ideas and stories.
“I've always wanted to create. It’s who I am.”