Ashish Shah’s ‘Chaap’ Is An Experimental Short Film Blurring Folklore & Reality In Jaipur

Ashish Shah’s experimental short film ‘Chaap’ (Imprint) for Studio Ford transforms Jaipur into a porous mythscape where reality dissolves into surreality.

The film follows two strangers, each an outsider in their own way, drifting through Jaipur as they encounter four nymphs: a king whose presence reminds them: nothing here belongs to anyone; a snake who exists as a story within the city, shifting with each telling; a group of musicians who appear and reappear, rearranged each time, yet always playing the same tune; and a master printmaker who has become inseparable from his craft, consumed by repetition, precision, and devotion. Through these encounters, stories begin to surface: of a colour that refuses to remain where it is placed, of a dye that absorbs the hues of its wearer, of objects that cannot be held without altering them.

Reminiscent of Tarsem Singh’s largely cult classic fantasy drama ‘The Fall’ (2006), ‘Chaap’ gestures towards the hidden desires that propel people towards the unknown and the unknowable. Here, the city becomes an unstable archive of its many-layered narratives. Shah’s Jaipur is neither documentary reality nor fantasy, but something closer to what Gilles Deleuze called the ‘time-image’ — an image that is different from itself, virtual to itself, and infused with the chronology of all its possible past and future images. The serpent is a story that takes a different shape in every telling; the musicians reappear endlessly yet never identically; and the drifters are forever changed by their encounters with and within the city. Through this cyclical narrative, Shah meditates on the instability of identity in contemporary urban life within economies of artisanal labour and inheritance.

As a modern fable, ‘Chaap’ departs from the moral absolutism traditionally associated with folklore, embracing ambiguity and instability instead. The film’s recurring motifs of dye, imprint, and transformation evoke the material flow of making, in which bodies and objects continually shape one another. Shot on film, the work conveys a remarkable tactile quality without a single line of dialogue; its grain and texture become extensions of the film’s meditation on residue, memory, and repetition. Like the colours and stories that drift through its labyrinthine Jaipur, nothing in ‘Chaap’ remains fixed for long. Shah ultimately presents the city not as a stable geography, but as a living surface of accumulated traces — where myth, labour, desire, and memory bleed endlessly into one another.

Watch ‘Chaap’ here:

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