Imaad Shah is dialling into Haruki Murkami’s universe with his debut short film

With this project, Imaad Shah has attempted to capture prose on film. Pic/Anmol Kachroo

In the entertainment business, Imaad Shah has mostly always been front-facing. Be it the theatre stage, movies, or as one-half of the electronic music duo Madboy/Mink, Shah's over two-decade-long career has largely played out before an audience and the camera. But what the actor-musician equally enjoys doing, and what he has been assiduously working towards for the last few years, is stepping behind the lens.

Apart from writing, Shah says over a phone call that he has "picked up the camera in a big way, shooting around a lot". His vision is to create a "sort of mix of documentary and fiction that feels like the real world" and captures the flavour of his home city, Mumbai.

This might seem like too many contrasting ambitions to pack into a film. But Shah's new 28-minute debut short, Tuesday Women, which had its world premiere at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) this past week, comes close.

Imaad Shah says he wants to make films that blend documentary and fiction, and captures the flavour of his home city, Mumbai. Pic/Sahir Raza

This is no ordinary filmmaking debut either, as it has Shah adapting the work of leading Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Tuesday Women, which follows a day in the life of a man whose domestic routine is interrupted by phone calls by women providing strangely profound insights into his life, is a composite of three of Murakami's short stories: The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women; The Year of Spaghetti; and The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1881 Indian Uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland and the Realm of Raging Winds.

Having devoured and admired Murakami's writings, Shah, 39, chose these three stories because he "saw a visual character in them". "They had a certain mystery, strangeness and comedy, which I found very fascinating," he says. "A lot of Murakami's short stories, and novels as well, inhabit a singular world. So, it was an interesting exercise to weave them into a singular narrative."

He wanted to stay true to the writing style of the author. "I feel like literature and film have a real connection with each other, going back all the way to the birth of film almost. And, I've always been very drawn to the idea of trying to replicate the feeling of prose on film, which is basically approximating how it feels to read a book on screen, rather than morphing it into something entirely different."

Tuesday Women follows a day in the life of a man whose domestic routine is interrupted by phone calls by women. Pics Courtesy/Sahir Raza

The film, Shah says, was made a couple of years ago as an experiment by him, with help from friends. DOP Sahir Raza shot the four-member ensemble cast - Neil Bhoopalam, Saba Azad, Odette Syiem, and Lin Laishram - in Shah's Mumbai apartment, with everything from production and set design managed by the home-grown crew. "There were no design, costume or hair-makeup teams. We barely had an assistant or two. Everyone was multitasking on set," recalls Shah.

Actor-friend Saba Azad, who as ‘Mink' has been his long-time musical collaborator, helped with reimagining his home, printing out wallpapers from a neighbourhood printer, and then sticking it to the walls using homemade glue made with maida. To bring in the local flavour, the small crew also went around shooting in some markets in Mumbai. "It all turned out to be really nice," he shares.

But it was only in late 2023, after Shah showcased his short at the work-in-progress lab of NFDC Film Bazaar (now called Waves Film Bazaar) - which gives selected filmmakers a chance to screen rough cuts of their films to a panel of international advisors - and received appreciation for it, that he and his team started to "buckle down to the realities of getting the official rights". They faced some roadblocks here, but with the help of common friends, "who were tuned into the publishing world, we managed to expedite the process."

His short is backed by Numaaish Productions and Motley, the theatre group co-founded by his father, veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah, which he says will slowly expand to producing films as well.

The BAFICI screening, he says, came about organically. "I actually met the director of the festival [Javier Porta Fouz] at the Film Bazaar. He had seen it and had expressed a lot of interest. So, we kind of stayed in touch."

Working on this short has also given Shah the motivation to write and direct more films in the future. Preferably, with Mumbai at the heart of his storytelling. "Generally, I love specificity in filmmaking, I think it's one of the things that films can do best, which is to bring alive a city. Bombay is visually exciting. That's the kind of films I love and want to make. Definitely."