Here’s how you make an indie movie in 2026

Nukkad Natak is an independent Hindi feature. The film follows two college students who are forced to confront life outside their elite campus after being expelled and sent to work with children in a nearby basti

On a busy street, a young filmmaker walks into traffic. This is a shoot, but for your phone screens. For weeks now, this young crew has been relying on social media and funny content to get the word out about their film. As they criss-cross India in a caravan, their pit stops double up as trailer screenings, NGO visits, and the occasional scenic halt for a quick reel. Months earlier, the same team was detained in Germany for trying to publicise their film without permission.

This is the team of Nukkad Natak, a social drama set to release on February 27 on the big screen. And, they are doing all they can to market and distribute their film from their own pocket.

Another first-time filmmaker, Sriram Emani, is preparing for his film Jam Boy's world premiere just blocks away from where immigration policies are written in the US. For a film about an Indian immigrant who may never be allowed to leave the country, premiering at the DC Independent Film Festival 2026 in Washington, DC, on February 15, this is no easy feat.

Neither project has a studio or a marketing budget worth the name. Together, Nukkad Natak and Jam Boy offer a sharp snapshot of what making it looks like today.

Directed and produced by Tanmaya Shekhar, Nukkad Natak is an independent Hindi feature. The film follows two college students who are forced to confront life outside their elite campus after being expelled and sent to work with children in a nearby basti. The idea, Shekhar says, came from growing up around an IIT campus and seeing "two Indias existing within a few kilometres of each other, without ever meeting."

From the start, the film was conceived as independent. "I always knew this would be an indie," he says. Years of pitching scripts taught him how slow and uncertain the process could be. So, he wrote practically, avoiding scenes he couldn't afford to shoot. Even then, money ran out more than once. "The day we finished shooting, we didn't have money to pay all the vendors," he admits. Fundraising continued long after the camera stopped rolling.

Speaking about the experience, he says casting, especially a 13-year-old girl from the basti, was one of the toughest challenges. The team conducted acting workshops in government schools near their shooting location, slowly building trust. "We didn't want a preachy film," Shekhar says. "We wanted something emotional, where people connect to the characters."

But finishing the film was only half the battle. Releasing it without a producer or distributor meant inventing a new playbook.

Sriram Emani's movie Jam Boy is about an Indian immigrant, who may never be allowed to leave the US

That playbook is now playing out on Instagram feeds and city streets. With Architaa Chawla joining as head of marketing and PR in the final months, the team launched a road-trip campaign across India. They are currently visiting cities where the film would screen, meeting audiences directly, performing with children, collaborating with NGOs, and documenting everything online. They have made humorous reels, launched a series called How to Enter Bollywood, created a Hindi alphabet song, and turned their own learning curve into content. "We wanted to connect directly with people," Chawla explains. "The film itself is called Nukkad Natak. So we went to the nukkad."

The now-viral Germany arrest happened during an overseas festival run, when the team tried promoting the film on the streets without clearance. Instead of burying the incident, they posted about it. The honesty worked.

Their strategy also leans on data. One key metric: interest numbers on BookMyShow. "If we can show one lakh people are interested," Shekhar says, "we can tell theatre owners that audiences exist." For small films competing with star-driven releases, show timings are everything.

Lead actress Molshri says the pressure is constant. "If this doesn't work, we go home," she says plainly. "It's all or nothing." But the team has also seen something else on the road: Young artists in smaller cities recognising their own futures in this journey. "They tell us, ‘If your film works, maybe we can do this too,'" says Shekhar.

Jam Boy unfolds in a far quieter way. Written, directed, produced, and performed by Sriram Emani, the dystopian short film follows a successful Indian immigrant in the US who begins to realise that freedom, especially the freedom to leave, may be slipping away.

The film draws directly from Emani's lived experience. "Once I went to the US, I became very hyper aware of all the parts of myself that I was erasing to belong - my name, my food, my accent, my habits. They want your brain, but not your food or your culture. That contradiction felt like something we needed to talk about," he says. The film asks what happens when the model immigrant story stops feeling like success and becomes a performance.

Emani chose sci-fi because it allows fear to be visualised. In Jam Boy's world, visas are needed not to enter the US, but to leave it. The anxiety is familiar. "I should not be afraid to get on a flight and see my mom," he says. "That happens in jail, not in a country you live in."

Food becomes the film's emotional anchor, a memory, a resistance, and an identity rolled into one. "They can change how you dress or speak," Emani says. "But they can't change how you eat."

Unlike Nukkad Natak, Jam Boy has taken the festival-first route. The film will premiere in competition at the DC Independent Film Festival on February 15, followed by screenings at the Boston Independent Film Festival and the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival. For Emani, festivals were always a strategy, not an afterthought. "Making the film is only half the work. The other half is figuring out how it enters the world. As a debut filmmaker today, you are not just a storyteller. You are building a community, a distribution strategy, and a conversation."

He adds that where a film premieres shapes how it is read. DC, he felt, was the right place to frame the story as emotional rather than partisan, as he wants the film to be a conversation about belonging rather than policy alone. "Film festivals were never just about screening the movie for me. They are where the film starts a conversation with audiences, policymakers, other filmmakers. Where a film premieres becomes part of its identity," he explains.

The response has surprised him. "I underestimated how much it would resonate," he admits. The film has sparked Q&As, community conversations, and interest from programmers and distributors who scout festivals for new voices. Emani sees this as part of a larger shift. As film equipment is cheaper and barriers to entry are lower, it's increasingly easier to make a film. But attention, however, is harder to hold. "Indie films grow through communities before they grow through algorithms," he says. Distribution, he believes, is no longer just a business decision but has become storytelling.

What connects Nukkad Natak and Jam Boy isn't genre or geography, but the absence of a safety net. One film fights for screen space in Indian theatres. The other fights to start a conversation in policy-heavy rooms. Both are navigating an industry where studios feel distant, money is scarce, and visibility has to be earned inch by inch.

Neither route guarantees success, but both reveal a generation of filmmakers refusing to wait for permission. Could these two films act as case studies into how first-time filmmakers can break into the industry? Quite possibly.

What they do reveal is how independent filmmakers can't simply rely on their filmmaking skills alone. As Emani puts it, "Independent films today grow through communities before they grow through algorithms. Unless you have very deep pockets for marketing, word of mouth and genuine connection are the only ways forward."