'You’ve given me something my family will cherish forever,' a stuntman told me, says Dream Factory director Aarushi Nigam

The last time we caught up with filmmaker Aarushi Nigam, she was trying to remain calm and composed, even as she quietly battled nerves ahead of the Asia premiere of her debut documentary Dream Factory at the Yellowstone International Film Festival, Mumbai. The film, centred on the unsung behind-the-scenes heroes of Bollywood, was about to face its first Indian audience.Now, after the screening, she is excited, elated and not as stressed. The documentary received a positive response from industry insiders, especially those who spend most hours of their day on a film set and yet have little idea of what a gaffer, a stuntman or a bouncer’s day actually looks like.The attendees included the producer of Kartik Aaryan’s Shehzada, the set on which Aarushi shot much of Dream Factory, the family of Nafis Mirza, who has headlined stunts in dozens of Bollywood films including Pathan, Kill, Dabangg 3, Chhaava, Skyforce, etc, Sankalp Meshram, a five-time National Award-winning filmmaker and a teacher at Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute and FTII , as well as several actors, assistant directors, some Shehzada crew members and their friends and families. But before any of them took their seats, Aarushi feared a no-show. “Nobody would show up, and if they do, they will hate the film,” she had imagined. Her fears were dispelled when Meshram took the mic after the credits rolled and said, “It was truly a Marxist film.” He noticed the finer details, the kind only teachers catch, and told the new filmmaker, “The film is reflexive, it’s self-aware and very vulnerable.”Aarushi recalled, “He saw all those things which I was going for.” Several ADs and actors in the audience later said only “nice things about the film.” She remembers them telling her, “We are on the sets all day, even then we didn’t know all of this.” One of them also told her the documentary was, "a lot of fun, like a Bollywood film." For the young filmmaker, these responses were “encouraging and awesome.”For Nafis’s mother, who has seen her son, and before him, her husband, perform risky stunts, watching the documentary was an “emotional moment”. She couldn’t stop crying, leaving Aarushi in tears as well. None of this would have happened had Aarushi given up on the idea of a premiere after a series of early rejections that almost pushed her towards releasing the film on YouTube. “I was very close to releasing the film on YouTube when I was getting rejections from everywhere, but they (the film’s protagonists: Gaffer or 'lightman' Sanjeev Batham, bouncer Mohammad Javed Shaikh and stunt coordinator Nafis Mirza) told me to keep trying even before watching the film. After Nafis watched the film, he sent me a long message saying, ‘You have given me something which my family will cherish forever.’”Going forward, Aarushi is focused on the distribution of her film. “Now that the premiere has happened, I want to try a lot of community screenings. I have heard that in Mumbai, places like Prithvi Theatre host a lot of community screenings. I just want to take the film to people. It is not only meant for film festivals. When I was editing the film, that was the one thing I wanted: to show it to the people for whom it was made.” She added, “Distribution is a long and arduous process for independent films, but I couldn’t have asked for a better start than this on home turf. This film has literally been a bootstraps operation from the start. For a feature length doc, it has a tiny crew, but with a big heart. We didn’t compromise with my vision anywhere, and so much of that is thanks to the cinematographer, Varun Kodamana, and the editor, Anny Dai. I got a lot of responses about how much fun the film is, that it’s slick and pace-y, that it never gets boring. Much of that credit belongs to Anny’s very competent grip on the material and on a very emotional director."The documentary, which had its world premiere at the 21st Indian Film Festival in Stuttgart, Germany, last year, has already brought Aarushi significant recognition. She won the Best Director award at the Mumbai Independent Film Festival. The film was also featured on Rolling Stone India’s list of Must-See Indie Films at the Yellowstone International Film Festival 2025 and was invited for a screening at the Indian Embassy in Berlin.Next, Dream Factory heads to the Aravalli Film Festival in early 2026. After Dream Factory, Aarushi Nigam has realised that the job of a filmmaker is not only to make a film but also to ensure it reaches its audience. “Being a filmmaker is amazing, but trying to pitch and sell it, I am not a fan of it. Filmmaking is exhausting, but it is good exhaustion,” she says as she gears up for taking Dream Factory to its next destination.