Abhishek Shah

Before he directed anything he cast for other people's Gujarati films. Casting is the least visible job on a set and the one that decides most of the outcome, and it explains the shape of everything he has made since. He did not direct his own film until Hellaro opened on 8 November 2019, three weeks before his thirty seventh birthday.

That is late by any industry's clock, and it is why his first film does not look like a first film. He had already spent years watching what a room does when the wrong actor walks into it.

Hellaro is set in 1975 in a village in the Rann of Kutch that has had no rain for years. The men perform garba to appease the goddess. The women are forbidden from playing it. They walk to a distant lake for water every morning, and one day they find an unconscious drummer, revive him, and dance for the first time in their lives.

Shah took the story from folklore around Vrajvani village in Kutch and from real instances of patriarchy in the region. There was no location that would hold it, so the production built one: fifteen bhungas, a town square and a temple, near Kuran village in the Rann. Saumya Joshi wrote the lyrics, additional screenplay and dialogue. Mehul Surti composed. Prateek Gupta co-wrote, edited, co-produced and served as associate director, which tells you the size of the team that carried it.

At the 66th National Film Awards Hellaro won the Swarna Kamal for Best Feature Film. Not best Gujarati film. Best film in India that year, the first time a Gujarati title had ever taken it. The same jury gave the Special Jury Award to Shraddha Dangar, Shachi Joshi, Denisha Ghumra, Niilam Paanchal, Tarjani Bhadla, Brinda Nayak, Tejal Panchasara, Kaushambi Bhatt, Ekta Bachwani, Kamini Panchal, Jagruti Thakore, Riddhi Yadav and Prapti Mehta together.

Read that award list again. A national jury looked at a film with thirteen women in it and refused to pick one. It opened the Indian Panorama at the 50th International Film Festival of India in Goa, where it also took a special mention for its music, colour and choreography, and it reported over Rs 16 crore worldwide, of which about Rs 1 crore came from overseas.

The film did not travel without resistance. A police complaint under the Atrocities Act was filed against the producer, director and writer over the use of the word Harijan in a line of dialogue, which the complainant said Scheduled Caste people consider derogatory. In Kutchmitra, the critic Ramesh Tanna called the film a must watch and then questioned its premise, arguing that the opposition to garba and embroidery it depicts was not accurate to the Kutch of the 1970s and that the film contains almost no Kutchi language despite being set there.

Both objections are worth keeping on the record next to the Swarna Kamal. A film that fights patriarchy in public gets audited in public, and the honest version of this page includes the audit.

A debut that wins the national top prize is usually the last good thing that happens to a director. Shah went back to work. Umbarro in 2025 is a family comedy drama adapted from the 2021 Marathi film Jhimma, again built as an ensemble of women: Vandana Pathak, Kaajal Oza Vaidya, Suchita Trivedi, Deeksha Joshi, Tarjanee Bhadla, Tejal Panchasara and Vineeta Joshee, released through Everest Entertainment.

Umbarro reported Rs 17 crore, one crore more than Hellaro, which means two of his three films sit inside the all time top ten highest grossing Gujarati films. In 2026 he changed register again with Dhabkaaro, a comedy with Deven Bhojani and Aarjav Trivedi, released on 1 May. The awards came first, then the receipts, which almost never happens in that order.