Short Stream | In Mumu Shelley, a heartwarming tale of finding connections in unexpected places

We meet Shelley, a small-town girl who is in Mumbai to work, and ostensibly, to find love. She has nervous energy, heightened by her camp, chintzy get-up. Shelley’s lover Mishti promises her that her older cousin, Mumu, will help them in revealing their relationship as a lesbian couple to Mishti’s family. Shelley arrives at Mumu’s house only to find that Mishti is late. So, she is forced to hang out alone with Mumu. The party never takes off, Mishti has ditched Shelley, and as the evening progresses, punctuated by many rounds of a fruity, mulchy cocktail and an obscene number of meaty dishes, both women begin to judge each other’s lives and choices. The neurotic perfectionist homemaker isn’t as put-together as she claims to be. Beneath Shelley’s irreverent exterior is an insecure young woman who deeply feels the betrayal by her girlfriend Mishti. By the end of the evening, they realise some dark comedic truths about each other.

There is a stylised cosiness and claustrophobic energy to the location. The Mukhtiar family turned their home into the set — with lights fixed on a grip on the ceiling, paints of women by women, like Frida Kahlo paintings, decorative bric-a-bracs, and copious amounts of food jam pack the set. The set becomes an extension of the two women's busy, over-occupied minds and burdened hearts. Will this evening be transformative for them?

Watch the film here:

“Since coming back from New York, Aiman had often discussed with me the idea of creating a film with her women actor friends and women directors. There are always so many conversations that take place between Aiman and me, between us and our women friends, our women relatives, younger and older. Then, there are conversations that we are all conditioned to mute. Aiman and I are keen to create narratives that reflect our situations and our lives but stay away from the usual tropes that women are normally portrayed within. Stories that are real, yet reflect the absurdity, the comedy of our situations that attract both Aiman and me,” says the director.

Mumu Shelley has been screened at the Chicago South Asian Film Festival 2021, Beyond Borders Feminist Film Festival 2021, Women’s Day Reels, 2022 and the 15th Annual QFest St.Louis, 2022. It was also shown at the KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, in 2022. It is yet to get a permanent home for screening.

Women finding their truths and voices through unlikely interactions with each other is a subject close to Aiman Mukhtiar’s sensibility as an actor and writer. She has completed a feature film, also directed by Batul Mukhtiar, in which two women discover uncomfortable truths on a road trip. “I often write keeping in mind the actor. A friend from my film school acted with me in the feature film and I asked her what kind of a character she wanted to play. She said somebody who doesn’t fit into conventional boxes. And the script developed from there,” Aiman Mukhtiar says.

Both Vivek Shah and Batul Mukhtiar are alumni of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. They have been used to making films on shoestring budgets right since their college days. “All the films Vivek and I have worked on together, 150 Seconds Ago (2002), Lilkee (2006) and Kaphal (2013), have required us to take on additional responsibilities apart from those of DOP and writer/director. So, we knew that in Mumu Shelley we weren’t doing anything drastically different, except this time everything was inside the house,” Batul Mukhtiar says.

As their new film, as yet untitled, prepares to go on the film festival circuit, Aiman Mukhtiar is gearing up for more stories, more roles and more collaborations. “Beyond anything else, I want to focus on experimenting with my craft and maturing my craft at this point. And collaborations with like-minded talent are best for that,” she says.

Short Stream is a monthly curated section, in which we present an Indian film that hasn’t been seen before or not widely seen before but is making the right buzz in the film industry and film festival circles. We stream the film for a month on HT Premium, the subscription-only section on hindustantimes.com.

Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at Sanjukta.sharma@gmail.com