Sayani Gupta has been part of two massively appreciated short films, one called Mala` that was premiered at the MAMI`s which got her the Best Actress award at the Bangalore International Short Film Festival. Leeches` was another short film, starring Sayani Gupta along with Preeti Golacha which was directed by Payal Sethi in 2016 which also gained International mass appreciation.

The short film has been around various major award shows and has got a tremendous amount of critical response and appreciation. It also won the Audience Choice Award at the Seoul International Women`s Film Festival, and now, it has successfully made it to the official selections of the 3rd Annual DFW South Asian Film Festival being held in Dallas. Sayani has been invited to attend the festival as the key member of the cast, representing Leeches` .

The plot of the film was to highlight an abstract concept of contract marriages prevalent in Hyderabad, which an elder sister tries to save her younger sister from.

They are one of the few Indian short films to have secured distribution from Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, where proceeds to go to Shaheen so they want to encourage people to watch it. They are the official selections at 45 film festivals to date, including Academy-qualifying Palm Springs, most prestigious short fest, Tampere, and Durban, Brussels, Sapporo in Japan, to name a few.

When they researched the subject through Hyderabad based NGO Shaheen, one of the few organizations in the middle of it all, trying to make a difference, Charminar, Talab Katta, Makhta, Pygah Palace were some of the locations where Contract or temporary marriage is a serious and very much prevalent issue.

An old custom that has found new roots among poor families in Muslim ghettos - rich patrons pay for temporary marriages conducted by pliant clerics, who draw up both marriage and divorce contracts simultaneously, so that the businessman is free to end the sham union whenever he is ready to leave the city.

When asked Sayani she said, "I am so happy to be traveling with this film. It's a pertinent story from India and a story that deserves to be told. These story has been inspired by many real life stories from the lives of many such Raisas who are suffering their dark present. A fascinating thing about shooting for this film is shooting in real locations like Charminar, Talab Katta, Makhta, Pygah Palace, etc. I was literally roaming around the streets of Hyderabad in a Burqa for 12 days and although I was totally alien in the world, I could seamlessly blend in. Even the dialect/accent is ghetto. The fact that so many varied stories are coming out of India to the rest word and the diaspora and foreign audience is getting exposed to it is great news."