Oct 29, 2026 4:42pm IST
Writer Aastha Tiku on Making Her Directorial Debut With ‘Dreamboat’ and Possible OTT Release (EXCLUSIVE)
Aastha Tiku is taking her short film “Dreamboat” to the Dharamshala International Film Festival. While the event itself is running from October 29 to November 1, her fantasy comedy offering will have its world premiere on the first day at 3 pm. It marks her directorial debut, for which she joins hands with producer Amit Masulkar after “Sherni”. Lead actress Sophia Ashraf, producer Masulkar and cinematographer Kabir Tejpal will be joining Tiku at the world premiere of the film.
“Dreamboat” is the story of a musician who goes through a forced breakup with her beloved pillow, which is thrown out by her mother. She seeks companionship and connection while being entangled with a mysterious homeless poet in Mumbai.
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In an exclusive conversation with Variety India, Aastha Tiku talks about her film and taking it to DIFF. “It's a fun film. On the surface, it seems very frivolous, but if you watch it and you see the layers. So I'm very curious to see how many of those layers the audience picks up and how they respond to it. I want to see what the audience experiences firsthand. That's why I'm here.”
Sharing how the “Dreamboat” came to be, she says, “The idea came to me in a dream. That's why I've called it ‘Dreamboat’. This was one of those where I had to translate it into a short film. It is political and subversive, but it came to me in a dream, so it’s coded.” She details that it took her three to four months to translate it into a cohesive screenplay, and calls it a very experiential film that’s “absurd, realist and has a life and a journey of its own”.
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Explaining the hurdles that she faced on the path to bringing this film to DIFF, she reveals that having a film with a 24-minute runtime makes it difficult to get noticed, “Anything that's under 10 minutes is generally preferred. And your chances of getting into festivals are more in that case; that's what I've come to know now.”
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