Renuka Shahane had the incandescent smile before Madhuri Dixit. The actress became a national name for co-hosting the hugely popular cultural magazine television show Surabhi on Doordarshan in 1993. Sooraj Barjatya, the director of Hum Aapke Hai Koun..! (1994), landed the perfect sibling pairing when he cast Shahane as Dixit’s older sister. The two sisters beam from ear to ear in the movie, lighting up the screen with their pearly white teeth.
Shahane has had a long career in Marathi and Hindi cinema. One of her earliest roles was as Shah Rukh Khan’s girlfriend in the 1989 television serial Circus. In 2009, Shahane adapted her mother Shanta Gokhale’s novel Rita Welinkar into the Marathi film Rita. She continues to appear in films (such as Highway in 2015), although not as frequently since her wedding to actor Ashutosh Rana.
Shahane returns to direction in her first short, Aathvan (Memory). The 10-minute film is the story of an old man (Anil Rastogi), who is suffering from memory loss. His children help him make connections between his past and his present. An old family photo album helps him recognise the people around him. He often slips into his older self as a photographer, which provides him with an escape route from the present world in which he is a stranger.