Making Dug Dug wasn’t the hardest part for indie filmmaker Ritwik Pareek. Getting it released was. The satire premièred at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). What followed was an almost five-year wait, until filmmakers Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikkhil Advani, and Vasan Bala came on board as executive producers and paved the road to its release.

According to the first-time feature director, without Kashyap, Dug Dug wouldn’t have found its way to cinemas. He first met Kashyap at his masterclass at the International Film Festival of Kerala in 2023. The director recalled, “Anurag sir said, ‘If you want to impress me, give me a Blu-ray of your film.’ So, I gave it to him.”

Kashyap didn’t watch the movie at the time. But after watching it at a screening in Los Angeles, he called Pareek immediately. “He loved it, and through Anurag sir, [they] all came,” he said, referring to Motwane, Advani, and Bala. 

For Pareek, the lesson is that independent filmmakers cannot survive alone. “You have to create your own tribe. If you’re a lone wolf, you can’t survive. It took me a year to understand that I was wasting my time waiting. Anurag sir says that as soon as a movie is over, move on to the next. It was hard to move on because this journey had not ended.”

He noted that the problem lies in India’s distribution system as “independent films are rarely promoted with the same seriousness as mainstream cinema.”