Syed Shadan's Chaar Diwaari, a psychological horror short film about a man who moves into a Mumbai flat that appears to shrink a little more with every passing night, won big at its North American premiere at Montreal's Fantasia International Film Festival. The film, which bagged the Bronze Audience Award 2026 and Best Asian Short, screened in the festival's Fragments d'Asie section alongside titles from Japan, China and South Korea, and stood as one of the only Indian films selected this year at the genre festival.
Chaar Diwaari reached Montreal with an added push: filmmaker Anurag Kashyap and producer Ranjan Singh signed on as presenters ahead of the premiere. Kashyap and Singh have both previously presented films at stages like Fantasia, and their involvement, Shadan says, has become more than a name on a poster — it is opening doors with festival programmers hearing about the film for the first time.
Produced by Shivek Gupta and Shadan, Chaar Diwaari follows an unnamed tenant, played by Abhinav Jha, who begins to fear that the walls of his new home are closing in around him — quite literally.
Ahead of the film's Fantasia premiere, Syed Shadan spoke to THR India about the story's origins, the real house that shrank and expanded under his crew's hands, what Anurag Kashyap and Ranjan Singh coming on board has done for the film, and the attention he feels genre films deserve.
How did a story like this — one that brings 'walls closing in' on life —come about?
I live in Bombay, and I used to live with some friends. There was a period when my friends had moved back to their hometowns and I was alone in the house. Since I'm a writer, I spend most of my time with my laptop, writing away, and there was a stretch when I realised I hadn't left the house or met anybody in over a week. I'd only spoken to a few people on calls, and I hadn't stepped out at all.
Since I'm a fan of the horror genre, and I like to torment myself every now and then, I came up with this thought: 'what if, when I'm going to sleep every day, the house is getting smaller overnight, and every day I'm waking up to a smaller house?'
That was the beginning of the idea, and then I experimented with how far I could take it.
What's the story behind Anurag Kashyap and Ranjan Singh coming on board to present this film?
When we got into Fantasia, my co-producer and I were initially hoping to both be there — unfortunately only he could go. We were thinking that if we could get Anurag or Ranjan on board, it would help, because Anurag has played there before, in the same category, with a film called The Last Ride. This time we were in that category, and the only film from India.
Going to another country, another festival, means you have to lay a foundation about who you are, what kind of work you've done, and why you're there in the first place, before they've even watched your film.
We really wanted a name like Anurag‘s that we could bring into a conversation, which would convince people to come watch our film.
And that's actually what happened —my co-producer told just that whoever he speaks to at the festival asks "Why we didn't put on your form? (that the film is presented by Anurag and Ranjan)" That's because they got on board after we'd already made it into Fantasia. They say if we'd mentioned it earlier, it would have been all over their website. We didn't know that, but the credibility and the kind of fanfare Anurag has internationally is helping us, and I'm really hoping people showed up for the screening partly because he is presenting it, and partly for the film.
There's a difference between psychological horror and jump-scare horror. How difficult was it to find that balance?
I've been following horror internationally for years, and even I went through my own journey of understanding the multiple manifestations of what unsettles you and what scares you. I saw The Zone of Interest, which is about the family of an officer who works at a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. But you never actually see the camp, there's only a thin wall between it and their house, and this family is casually going about their day and their life with the knowledge that hundreds of innocents are being killed right across that wall. Just the implication of it is scary.
That's what I wanted to achieve with this film — I don't want to define an entity or an idea; I wanted to play on the concept that a house trying to swallow you whole. The one place you associate with comfort and protection ends up being the thing that swallows you and traps you within it's confines forever.
I'm a fan of all kinds of horror, but I chose to do this because it's coming from a very lived-in experience — I felt the fear myself while living alone and writing this film. I think horror is at its best when the creator tells the world, "This is what I'm scared of, and this is what I think is the worst that can happen."
Do you have any memorable anecdotes to share from the set?
Of course! This is the thing I love talking about the most. While I was writing, there was no visual reference for what it would actually look like for the walls to close in — we've all heard the phrase, but what does that look like? It was only when I spoke with my production designer, Avani, that we figured out how to try it. She was confident we could pull it off, but she was very particular that we shoot in a real house.
We lucked out — we got a very cooperative family who lent us the house they actually live in. While we were shooting, the grandmother of the family was still living in one of the rooms we never go into in the film. We did things to that house that even the kindest of souls wouldn't normally allow, but Aunty was a godsend and had absolutely no qualms about what we were doing.
By the end of the shoot, we had changed the house and moved our fake walls around so much that even the crew lost sense of what the house used to look like before we started. It was only once the art department had cleared everything out that we thought, "Oh my god, this is a massive house."
We were just hoping and praying it gets captured properly on camera, because losing your sense of what one space actually is, in so many different ways, is extremely unsettling.
Fantasia is marking its 30th edition this year, with Chaar Diwaari playing alongside films from Japan, China and South Korea. Does this feel like a first for Indian genre cinema, or an overdue recognition?
It actually feels like both of those things. Anurag has been to Fantasia multiple times, so there's been a continuous presence at these genre festivals from India. But when I speak with my co-producer, who's at the festival right now, he keeps telling me there are films from Kazakhstan, Mongolia and places we don't usually expect films from — and these are some of the best films he's ever watched. And we don't have a single Indian feature film playing at the festival. Ours is the only Indian short film at the festival.
I think that's a symptom of where our energy as an industry is going towards, because there is no support for independent cinema in our country right now. There are obviously people like Anurag, Ranjan, Vikramaditya [Motwane] and others who've been championing independent voices. Even internationally, we make it to Berlin, to Cannes, to all the premier festivals. But there are so many more festivals built around genre film, because genre films usually don't have good luck at the premium ones — those tend to favour films with social weight, a different kind of audience. But there are genre-specific festivals that play all kinds of horror, action, sci-fi — the kind of films we in India barely see once or twice a year in our theatres.
There is the feeling of - 'Where are the other Indian films?' It's a matter of pride that we're there as the only Indian film this year, but in the larger scheme of things, I'm not that happy about it either.