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Film posters are often designed to introduce audiences to a story, but for artist Abhishek Chaudhary, they can also serve a different purpose: helping people revisit the films that have stayed with them long after they've watched them. Through his ongoing series of reimagined movie posters, Chaudhary moves away from conventional marketing-driven designs and instead focuses on the emotions, scenes, and memories that define a film in the minds of its viewers. Drawing inspiration from films that have personally resonated with him, Chaudhary's posters distil complex narratives into singular visual ideas.
I don't think I ever paid attention to film posters until I entered college. They used to be just those things that told me who was in a film and who made it — never a point of intrigue or interest. And then, when I entered college and became part of a film and theatre club, I saw all these extremely imaginative and creative people put their heads together to decide what would best represent the ethos, the tone, and the characters of the small but mighty productions we used to put on. That's when I saw the effort and intention that goes behind a well-done poster, where everything — from the colour to the texture to the font — is thought through in alignment with the project as a whole.
The poster becomes the audience's first gateway into the world of the film.
Berlin-based artist Abhishek Chaudhary dives into that very idea of capturing the essence of a film and turns it inward for his film poster series, where he's reimagining movie posters from across years of cinema. By picking films that resonated and stayed with him years after watching them, his iterations don't necessarily follow the usual conventions of "poster making" — instead trying to encapsulate what those movies made him feel and what aspects of them stood out to him the most, as an audience member.
"Think of it like this: you don't remember the whole story of a film — you remember bits and pieces, some visuals, and you connect and relate to those. So why not explore that part? It's more about the story than the star cast, and about the nostalgia people carry, or the movie they hold in their memory. You have to scratch that itch. That's where this came from — making posters that celebrate the stories, rather than who starred in them or who made them."
Abhiskek Chaudhary
My favourite (and Chaudhary's favourite) of the series is the reimagined poster of the iconic satirical comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. The film is one of a kind — not just for its incredible cast of independent actors and its absolutely stellar writing, but also for how it aged and made people feel. The climax of the film is probably one of my favourite scenes in Hindi cinema, overall. And even if you don't remember how and why the characters ended up at a Mahabharat re-enactment show, the following scene of three groups of people fighting for a corpse dressed up as Draupadi is etched in everyone's mind.
And Chaudhary's poster captures that perfectly. It takes the last 15 minutes of the film and transposes it onto the Last Supper, except we have Draupadi in the centre, with the rest of the characters flanked on both sides trying to get to "her" (D'Mello's dead body, played by Satish Shah). The poster makes you giggle — like you're in on an inside joke — and makes you want to revisit that scene.
Chaudhary makes it clear from the get-go that his posters are for people who have already watched these films; they're his way of making the films part of his own imagination, too, and bringing people into the world these movies have created for him, personally.
Speaking about his distinct style, which can be seen throughout all his work, including this series, he calls it a "khichdi", drawn from everything he has consumed and been inspired by, that has become his own style. "I was a fine art student, then I went into design, then I came into product design. There's some Andy Warhol in it — I'm influenced by pop art. I like Russian Suprematism, I like Picasso's abstract work. If you look at my older work, it doesn't really match what I do now — it was something before, and now it's become something else. It's a bit of a shape-shifter — it takes a new form every time."
What stayed with me after scrolling through Chaudhary's feed isn't just recognition, though there's plenty of that gleeful "wait, I know this scene" moment — like how he reimagined the Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara poster by including the three adventures the characters go on. It's the reminder that a poster doesn't have to sell you a film to make you feel something about it. He strips away the marketing sheen with his khichdi of styles, hands the story back to the people who already loved it, and lets them sit with it a little longer. His posters are about why we remember the films we remember, and what it looks like when someone else remembers them the exact same way.
Follow Abhishek Chaudhary on Instagram.
