With ‘Stolen’ recently winning big at the Screenwriters Association Awards,
co-writer Dr. Swapnil Salkar details why the film resonates with audiences and
shares his own journey into filmmaking
CHRISTINE MACHADO | NT BUZZ
Dr. Swapnil Salkar’s journey into films began with childhood cinema outings. “My whole family were big Bollywood cinema buffs. Every Sunday, my parents, sister and I would go to the cinema to watch the newest movie releases,” he recalls. “I was also into plays, poetry, and songwriting, so I was always drawn to storytelling.”
This interest first found expression in songwriting; he wrote the lyrics for a song in ‘Angry Indian Goddesses’.
But it was a filmmaking workshop conducted by Bollywood screenwriter and lyricist Mayur Puri that proved to be a turning point. It was there that Dr. Salkar, aka Agadbumb, was encouraged to take his writing more seriously. “He was the first one to tell me that I have a talent for writing and supported me artistically. Sometimes you just need that one person to believe in you,” he says.
While he initially experimented with filmmaking alongside his medical career, he moved to Mumbai in 2017 to focus on cinema full-time. “I joined Jungle Book Studio first as a production assistant and then slowly rose through the ranks to become the head writer,” he says. In November 2019, along with producer Gaurav Dhingra and director Karan Tejpal, he began writing what would become ‘Stolen’.
The film was inspired by a newspaper report about two city boys from Guwahati who went fishing in a village and were mistaken for child kidnappers and lynched. “It made us think about mob psychology. At that time, we were also working on a fiction series about missing children in India, so we merged both ideas into one story,” shares Dr Salkar.
After a pause during the pandemic, the team took the film to the Venice Film Festival in 2023. “We were the only film from India that year,” he says. It then travelled to festivals in Zurich, China and London, where it received strong responses. “In Beijing, people were crying at the end and later came for autographs and photos, which was a first for me. I was surprised that a film so rooted in India could connect so widely. It showed me what stories can do,” he says.
‘Stolen’, now streaming on Amazon Prime, has won at the Filmfare Awards, Screen Awards, and most recently at the Screenwriters Association Awards 2026, where it won Best Screenplay (Feature Film) and Best Story (Feature Film).
“The Screenwriters Association Awards felt special because, unlike other awards where OTT and theatrical films are separated, here we were competing directly with big releases like ‘Dhurandhar’, ‘Metro… In Dino, Haq’, etc. It felt good to be recognised as the Best Story and Screenplay among them, especially by our own fraternity,”
he says.
But Dr. Salkar believes screenwriters still need greater recognition. “Scriptwriting is not meant to be read, it is meant to be seen. Writers remain in the background. But before a writer writes, a director has nothing to direct and an actor has no material to perform. Writers need more credit, though they also have to keep upgrading their craft,” he says.
Currently working on a horror comedy set in Goa based on Konkani folklore, apart from consulting on Telugu and Marathi scripts, he hopes to return to directing in the future. He shares, “I am in the process of setting up my own studio, Studio Agadbumb, in Goa.”
