Tanmay Shah

Tanmay Shah is a Gujarati director, writer, editor, cinematographer, script, and screenwriter. Also, Tanmay Shah is the CEO and Founder of ‘Friday Fiction Films.’ He was born in 1989 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. He completed his school education at Firdaus Amrut Higher Secondary School, Ahmedabad. After that, he completed Engineering in Information Technology. He has worked as a project trainee at Physical Research Laboratory. He worked as a research associate at the Indian Institution of Technology Bombay.

Meanwhile, he wrote a story for a video game by a friend who had created it, which inspired him to become a filmmaker. Later, he left his job at IIT Bombay and went back to Ahmedabad to make films. In 2015, Tanmay Shah started a project of making 52 zero-budget short films in a year on many social issues. The issues varied from Parenting, Light Pollution, Language Manipulation to Child Abuse, Global Terrorism, and Lesbian Wedding. He made his debut film of the project, and on January 2, he released it on the YouTube channel of FridayFictionFilms. Every Friday, he released one short film for the next fifty-two weeks. All the films have been shot in Ahmedabad. Almost one-seventy actors were part of the project, and many of them were non-professionals. In 2016, he received Limca Book of Records and held a Golden Book of World Records, Indian Book of Records, and Asia Book of Records in making 52 short films in 52 weeks in a year. The project also brought together the trend-setting example of the art of creative thinking, creative fiction filmmaking, and practicing agile execution in short films.

Tanmay Shah is a TEDx speaker and has given a TEDx talk at a TEDx event in TEDxBITSHyderabad about 52FilmsProject. In 2016, Tanmay Shah made the Gujarati language twelve-minute short documentary film, “Pinch of Salt,” based on the lives of 30,000 salt pan workers of Kutch, Gujarat. The documentary was screened at the international film festivals of Russia, Romania, Canada, the USA, Spain, Germany, the UK, and Serbia. It has also won Best Short Documentary Award in 15 International Film Festivals. His other documentary, “Walls That Matter,” based on the story of Anil Shah, a specially-abled artist, has won an award at the 12th Chicago South Asian International Film Festival 2021.

On August 22, 2017, he inaugurated a visual art exhibition, “Concoct,” with over 45 artworks, including 27 photographs and 18 paintings. Also, he has worked in over 200 municipal schools in the remotest villages in Gujarat while painting five-thousand educational wall paintings.