Exclusive | Cinema Yatra: How Indie Film 'Nukkad Natak' Ran A Sensational Cross-Country Marketing Campaign

Writer-director Tanmaya Shekhar—the ‘a’ at the end of Tanmaya is silent—cooked up a noise online with the marketing campaign for his upcoming film Nukkad Natak, releasing on February 27 in theatres.

An independent film, crowded with debutantes—from the actors to the technicians—with no big name backing it, but big, some might even say delusional, dreams to have a hundred housefull shows, the journey of the making and marketing has been long, fuelled by a singular, dedicated, but productive frustration.

Shekhar shafted his IIT Kanpur-to-data scientist pipeline and chose cinema, instead, swapping a cushy life in the USA for the Versova hustle. “I have been making short films since 2015, but nothing blew up,” he tells THR India. He decided to reverse engineer his feature film. Having worked on the production of many low-budget indie projects in the USA—including one by Focus Features and two HBO shows—Shekhar “knew how to structure and scale a film based on the fact that I can only make it with a twenty person crew.”

In the age of the filmmaker-entrepreneur, Shekhar has tried to further polish and push that idea, fitting his vision into the logistics within which he can make it come true, what he calls “controlled ambition”.

Nukkad Natak was conceived in 2022, and fundraised with the help of IIT alumni, seniors, and close friends. ₹40-50 lakhs were raised in the first round of fundraising. The film was shot at the IIT Dhanbad campus—made easily available given Shekhar’s father is the university’s dean, with Shekhar’s family providing lodging for the cast and crew, and Shekhar’s grandmother feeding everyone. This is a familiar story, where filmmakers pool together the resources and goodwill of the near and dear to, somehow, cobble a film together. But that is merely one piece of the shifting puzzle.

“After that, we had to raise more money for the edit. This time, since we had a rough cut trailer from the footage, it was easier to fund-raise. We now started reaching out to people I didn’t know before,” Shekhar notes. An old man who saw them filming, and had a good feeling, told his daughter to pitch in. Another alumnus, hearing about a film being shot on his campus, parted with some funds. In December 2024, the film finally premiered at the Kolkata International Film Festival, where it bagged the Special Jury Award.

To make a film might be one battle, but to get that film seen, is another war altogether. Shekhar spent the following eight months chasing producers and OTT platforms, to no avail. Barely a handful watched the film: one of them was writer-director Imtiaz Ali, who tried making some calls, with nothing materialising.

“We were trying to do things behind closed doors, and we realised nothing was happening,” Shekhar notes. A second frustration brewed, and this led him to make the micro-drama series How To Enter Bollywood, on Instagram, about trying and not being able to crack it. Ali even made a cameo in this series. Sweet and idealistic, these clips spoke to the frustration of wanting to make movies without giving into any cynicism, upholding the romance of cinema over the rigour it demands of your patience and pockets.

“We did the first season, and that did really well, and then, the pieces came together. Then, in October 2025 we realized we had to release the film ourselves; we cannot wait for anyone to come help us.” Inspired by Zohran Mamdan’s campaign for New York City’s mayor, “We realised we could pivot How To Enter Bollywood into the making of Nukkad Natak,” Shekhar notes. Instagram’s algorithm further helped spread the word of these videos which feature the lead actress Molshri, among others. With a groundswell of support, people tagging them, collaborating with them, their reach further grew. The trailer of Nukkad Natak has over a million views on Instagram. (The trailer has 600,000 views and counting on YouTube.)

They even rented out a caravan for two months. With six team members, they charted a five-week yatra from Mumbai to Kolkata—through Ahmedabad, Baroda, Bhopal, Indore, Kota, Jaipur, Delhi, Kanpur, Agra, Bodh Gaya, and Dhanbad—meeting people everyday, going to schools, colleges, NGOs, singing songs from the film, spreading cheer. “We even screened our film in villages on the way.” They documented this, too, meticulously—when no one showed up to their meet and greet, or when people poured in. Each of these mini-episodes followed the same format—a set up of deep disappointment capped by a pinch of hope.

They concluded this yatra on Sunday, February 22, with a walk from Versova, in North Bombay all the way to South Bombay. They began at 8 am, and kept walking, even performing in front of the Red Chillies Entertainment office. At Carter Road in Bandra, they took a detour, instead going to the Spoken Word Fest—“a lot of our peers, the kind who would watch Nukkad Natak would be there”. They spent a lot more time than expected there, and had to cheat, using the caravan to get to South Bombay in time for closing the yatra at Marine drive. “We must have spoken to about 300-350 people, 15-20 people even bought tickets on the spot.”

Distributing and marketing a film is an expensive affair, too.

“These costs were substantial. We need 25 lakhs to get to the finish line. We still don’t have all the money. We even made a last-ditch crowdfunding ten days ago, for which I got a lot of flak.” They are still 15 lakhs short of the money they need, but Shekhar isn’t fazed. “Everything is in motion, ho jayega sab kuch (everything will work out), I don’t know kaise, but one way or another it will release”. They recently met the people at Cinepolis, who, impressed with the organic traction, opened up the advance booking for some shows a week prior to the release. These are small wins, which evoke hope, but the question of whether this is replicable or not hangs over it.

“I have spent so many nights crying. You are not just fighting the system, but even the people you are working with—they are freelancers juggling five low-budget independent films to make ends meet. The edit, then, takes long, so even when the film is being made, you wonder if it will ever get finished. And even when it gets made, you wonder if it will be seen. You have to just figure out a way to power through—there is no other option,” Shekhar notes.