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MUMBAI: When it comes to making dreams larger than life, Sitara has found a way to turn an unlikely story into an international talking point. Tamasha Studios’ AI filmmaking ambitions have received a global boost, with filmmaker and creative collaborator Abhik Banerjee earning the Outstanding Artistic Achievement recognition at the Astana AI Film Festival in Astana, Kazakhstan.
The film secured second place in the 2026 competition, which attracted 8,067 entries from 125 countries, with only 25 films making it to the final international contest. The recognition comes with a prize of $250,000, approximately Rs 2.4 crore, marking a significant milestone for Banerjee, Tamasha Studios and its exploration of artificial intelligence as a creative medium.
Created by Banerjee in collaboration with Rollsound Studios, Sitara tells the story of Bittu, a man who cleans the city’s toilets but is denied the dignity and respect others take for granted. His dream is disarmingly simple: to be recognised by his name and, perhaps one day, have someone ask to take a photograph with him.
A stranger’s kindness and a scrap of newspaper set him on an unexpected, surreal path towards that dream. Beneath its unusual premise lies a familiar human question: who gets to be seen, heard and treated with dignity?
For Banerjee, the recognition is as much about the possibilities of the medium as it is about the film itself. “AI is still a very young medium, and we are only beginning to understand its creative potential. The exciting question for me isn’t simply what AI can generate, but what kind of cinema becomes possible because these tools exist,” he said.
The festival brought together an international jury representing cinema, culture, technology and artificial intelligence. Its members included former UNESCO director-general and former French culture minister Audrey Azoulay, Ma Ping of China Film Group, Wang Hao of Beijing Film Academy, entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, and Li Long, BytePlus general manager for the Middle East, Africa, India, Türkiye and the CIS region.
For Tamasha Studios founder Mithilesh Bhagat, Sitara is part of a broader effort to explore AI-led storytelling across formats rather than treat the technology as a shortcut to production.
“At Tamasha, we are not looking at AI as a gimmick or simply a faster production tool. We are actively exploring what it can do across micro-dramas, series, films, serials, animation and hybrid shoots. Every format gives us a different understanding of the technology and its creative potential,” Bhagat said.
The studio’s approach centres on combining Indian storytelling with emerging AI tools to explore new creative possibilities and build towards global cinematic ambitions. The idea is to understand how the technology can serve different kinds of stories, rather than allow the technology itself to dictate them.
With Sitara, that exploration begins with a character whose ambitions are modest but whose struggle speaks to something universal. Its international showing gives Tamasha Studios another reason to pursue AI filmmaking, while underlining that behind the technology, the most compelling stories may still be about the most human of desires: to be seen.
