A black kurti paired with a red coloured stole around the neck, a hand-painted caravan that is carrying roughly 20 people, backpacks ready, schedules set, but where are they heading to? A road trip to a trekking place, or a beach escape, or a retreat in the mountains? Well, the destination is none of these, as the team is heading to different places in India to promote their first independent film Nukkad Natak.
If you’re scrolling through your Instagram or YouTube and still haven’t come across Tanmaya Shekhar's and Molshri's innovative-marketing strategies for their upcoming film Nukkad Natak, you're probably missing out on something. With no star-studded cast and no established industry names attached, the film stands apart in today’s commercial cinema landscape. The movie is, in fact, directed by a 28-year-old Kanpur IIT student, who wants to make a change in society through his films. Written and directed by Tanmaya Shekhar with Molshree and Shivang Rajpal in lead roles, Nukkad Natak is hitting the screens on February 27.
No production house, no backup in the industry
Nukkad Natak was first premiered in UK’s Asian Film Festival, where Molshree bagged the award for the best actor. The film also went on to win the Best Debut Film Trophy at the Indo-German Film Week 2025 and the Special Jury Award in Kolkata International Film Festival in 2025. The next step, as Molshree says, was pretty simple-“Reaching out to production houses with our film and getting a decent producer who would release Nukkad Natakon big screens.” But after months of struggle, they were unable to get a production house, so they went to different OTT platforms, but luck did not favour them. After years of writing mails, knocking on the doors of several producers and OTTs, Tanmaya decided to independently release the movie in theatres all over India.
“But the most challenging part was spreading awareness of the movie. And as an outsider in Bollywood, it's really tough to go from place to place to promote the movie. But one thing we were sure of was that it had to reach every village in India,” Molshree tells TNIE. That is when the crew decided to move to different villages and cities in India in their caravan and promote their movie.
A film showing two Indias within one India
Tanmaya Shekhar’s directorial debut Nukkad Natak (street play) revolves around the lives of two college students Molshree and Shivang, who are expelled from the college for some reason. Following this, the duo requests the director of the college not to expel them, assuring that they will do anything for the college, and that’s when they are handed over the responsibility of going to a slum area and educating the children. It’s a coming-of-age drama where the two actors as individuals realise that what may have been served on their plate so easily is actually what some people struggle for years. In this story its education that is easily accessible to Molshree and Shivang, and when they go to the slum, their bubble just breaks when they have to encourage the parents of the poor to send their children to schools and make them understand that education is a basic right of every human being.
Marketing strategies
The team of Nukkad Natak comprises 30 crew members, each of whom is new to the industry in some or the other way. Starting from the costume designer, to the playback singer, to the lead actors, the director, everyone is new. The team launched a viral Instagram series titled How to Enter Bollywood, which revolves around two outsiders trying to break into the industry. The series with 25 episodes has garnered over 15 million views.
The crew in their caravan has gone to Delhi, Rajasthan, Bhopal, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Indore, and other cities to promote their movies. Holding posters in one hand and a mic in another, they are actually performing nukkad to attract their audience. The trailer has also crossed 5.5 million views on YouTube within a month. Recently,filmmakers like Imtiaz Ali and Anurag Kashyap have also talked about the film in their interviews.
When TNIE asked Tanmaya what inspired the IIT-graduate to make this film, he shares an anecdote that changed his life. “As my dad was also a professor at IIT Dhanbad, I have always grew up in IIT campus. I lived there in the residential buildings. One day, my mother, who was a teacher back then, took me to a slum where she was given an assignment to teach some students from the area. It was then when it struck me that the IIT campus and the slum had been co-existing within the same geographical area and yet there was a stark contrast between these two worlds. From that time, I had decided that I had to do something for them.”
When asked about the experience of acting in first movie that too a non-commercial one, Molshree said, “It did not even feel like I was acting in a movie because everything felt so real, The slum that we went to in the movie is a real slum location just next to the campus of IIT Dhanbad where we interacted in person with the families and understood their problems. We premiered our movie for the first time for the kids of that village. The children were so happy to see themselves on big screens. Every time they laughed, they giggled; it gave us a sense of relief and brought us to our goal of releasing the movie all over India.”