Peepingmoon.com has an exciting update for all those readers asking about Shoojit Sircar’s next project. We have exclusively learned that the ace filmmaker has signed Amitabh Bachchan and the late Irrfan Khan’s son, Babil I. Khan, for his next production venture, titled The Umesh Chronicles. It’s an independent slice-of-life drama and will see Bachchan playing an extended cameo role. The film marks Sircar’s fourth collaboration with Big B after Piku, Gulabo Sitabo, and the unreleased Shoebite, while it’s his first project with Babil, who’s set to make his acting debut this year with the Netflix India Original, Qala. 

The Umesh Chronicles is said to be a special project that Shoojit Sircar and his business partner Ronnie Lahiri are producing in association with an international production company. The Sweden-based filmmaker Pooja Kaul, who has previously helmed award-winning short films like Rasikan Re, Winter Trail, and Sundar Sari, will make her feature directorial debut with this film. Kaul’s sensitive and intimate work examines Indian society in the light of its richly developed past, finding parallel textures and sensibilities and forging connections between past and present, and her debut feature film is also believed to be set in a similar space. The film has already gone on floors in Lucknow and the makers are planning to premiere it at multiple international film festivals worldwide before releasing it in India. 

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The Umesh Chronicles is a story of growing up in small-town middle-class India and revolves around an urban woman, walking a line between tradition and modernity, not fully at ease in either, but making her own space between the two. Although the makers haven’t revealed who plays the central role of Radha, we heard Babil will be seen essaying a servant boy about her age. "The film presents two ‘Indias’ living next to each other, but still communicates the special Indian code of somehow managing the grace of living side by side. It’s the story of the soul of a nation and the making of a woman, "a source close to the project told us, adding that the film will be shot across Lucknow over a 20-day schedule.