When director Chintan Sarda’s writer-friend mentioned a tragic case of an Alzheimer’s patient, it sowed the seeds for The Broken Table. The short film — starring Naseeruddin Shah and Rasika Dugal — unfolds over a day, as caregiver Deepti deals with Giri, an Alzheimer’s patient who keeps looking for his dead wife.

The director says that the interaction between the two characters in a tragic setting caught Shah’s attention. “Together, we worked on creating the motivation and back-story for Giri,” says the director. 

Having grown up on a steady diet of Shah’s films, it was an honour for Sarda to direct the senior actor. “Naseer saab wanted to prep for it like a play; he questioned everything till it made sense. Being around him and Rasika every day was almost like a masterclass.”

Shah is known to be choosy about his projects. But the actor says that it is always a delight to collaborate with fresh voices. “In the past few years, I have been part of several short films. It has been a stimulating experience to work with young filmmakers who think out of the box, and make movies they want to, without worrying about the pressures of the producers, distributors and casting stars,” he says.

The “poignant” script, coupled with the chance of working with Shah, made Dugal come on board. “Naseer saab has taught me at the Film and Television Institute [of India]. I know the fundamentals of acting because of him.”