Sayani Gupta, long celebrated for her discerning acting choices, makes a powerful directorial debut with Aasmani, a short film that has already clinched three awards in three days at Harvard, Houston, and Austin. Starring the legendary Revathi, the film follows an older woman and her powder-blue Fiat through memory, friendship, and quiet resilience, reflecting Gupta’s deeply personal, women-led artistic vision.
Long admired for her thoughtful acting choices, Sayani Gupta steps behind the camera with Aasmani, a debut short that has already swept three awards in three days at Harvard, Houston, and Austin. Starring the legendary Revathi, the film follows an older woman and her powder-blue Fiat through memory, friendship, and quiet resilience — reflecting Gupta's deeply personal, women-led artistic vision.
Gupta has spent 15 years building one of Indian cinema's most intentional bodies of work, from Margarita with a Straw to Article 15 to the beloved Four More Shots Please, consistently choosing projects that demand something of their audience. What that body of work did not yet reveal was that she had been a filmmaker in waiting all along.
Aasmani — written, directed, and produced by Gupta under her banner Sayani Gupta Movies — went through 18 drafts and won 14 awards before a single frame was shot. When it finally reached the festival circuit, the response was swift: the South Asian Person of the Year honour at Harvard; the prestigious REMI Special Jury Award at the 59th Houston International Film Festival, announced before the world premiere had even begun; and the Audience Choice Best Short Film Award in Austin the very next day.
In an exclusive conversation with Robb Report India, Gupta reflects on building Aasmani from a single flash image, what the FTII entrance exam cost her, and the particular kind of validation that makes a retired history professor's voice crack on a voice note.
Sayani Gupta: Each was entirely different. Harvard was for me as a person — the South Asian Person of the Year — which is enormously humbling and something I am still processing. I wrote that speech on my flight there and never once read it out loud. I guess the speech entailed everything I was feeling sitting on that flight to Harvard, which was bookmarked by only gratitude and a third-eye view towards my own life up until that moment.
Houston was where we had the world premiere of Aasmani. The REMI Special Jury Award was actually announced before our screening began, which is something I had no frame of reference for. I was shaking. And then Austin — the Audience Choice Award — which meant that the people in the room chose us. That is its own kind of validation.
But honestly, beyond the awards — sitting in a cinema with a live audience and watching something you have built brick by brick — no experience in my life matches it.
SG: I think the two are genuinely inseparable. To know yourself, you need a certain degree of courage. And when you have courage, you come to know yourself more clearly.
I come from privilege — not financial, but the privilege of education and culture. A childhood full of books, music, theatre, cinema, and conversation. That gave me the ability to know, quite quickly, what I did not want. I knew I was a performer. I had been, essentially, my entire life until that corporate year. And I knew with absolute certainty that I did not want to spend my life in a glass building.
At the time, it did not feel like courage. It felt like clarity. But yes — looking back, it took a great deal of both.
SG: I had just come back home after a really beautiful conversation with a veteran actress, and I had told her impulsively that I would write something for her. I came home and sat at my dining table, staring at a small blue toy car that my stylist had gifted me about a decade ago. It sits on my windowsill and has been there all this time.
And then I got this flash image — an older woman, changing the tyre of a car. An image I had never seen in real life or in any film. It felt like there was something there. I sat down and started writing. The name Aasmani came within the first 30 seconds. The first scene arrived, then the second, then the third, and the other characters began coming, almost like portals opening.
By the time I had drafts ready, I already knew the colours, the costumes, the props, the wallpapers. I did the costumes for the film and collaborated with two amazing designers, Manan & Pero. My colourist, Sid Meer, was one of the first people to read the script because I already knew how I wanted it to look.
SG: From the women who brought me up. My nani, my grandaunts, my mother, my aunts — they are fierce, independent, educated, and deeply graceful women. My teachers growing up. These are the women I understand and love most.
Aasmani is, in many ways, a homage to all of them. But the film is not only grace. There is also mischief, banter, candour, and humour. Smita and the car are two sakhis — two best friends — bound by memory, loss, and philosophy. The quiet beauty was never a stylistic choice made from a distance. It came with the thought, as I was writing. It was always already there.
SG: For any artist, the two are the same. Your work is an extension of who you are — your philosophy, your ethics, your politics, your way of thinking. I cannot separate my personal self from my creative self.
But I also want to push back slightly on the framing, because I do not think it has to be one or the other. I think substance and spectacle can be friends — in fact, the best films make them inseparable. Laapataa Ladies is one of my favourite films in recent years, because it is enormously entertaining and also deeply crafted and meaningful. That is exactly what I was reaching for with Aasmani. And hopefully, from what I am hearing from audiences now, something of that landed.
SG: My entire family are academics — teachers, professors, researchers, scientists. I come from a middle-class Bengali family, and I became an actor, which is not exactly what they imagined for their child. So there was always, on my part, a sense of having defied them. Even though I now realise that defiance was only possible because they enabled me. The courage I had as an 18-year-old to go to Delhi, to go to FTII in Pune, even to defy them — came from them.
When the Harvard call came, my first response was: Why me? It was never a moment of feeling like I had arrived. And then I told my closest masi — a retired History professor — and she sent back a voice note. And I could hear her voice crack.
That is all that matters to me. More than any award, that is the moment I will carry.