Veteran actress Shabana Azmi has collaborated with Tony award-winning director Michael Mayer, Italian author Erri De Luca and his partner Paola Bisson for a project amidst the global coronavirus lockdown, reports the Mumbai Mirror.

Talking about the project, Azmi stated that its called Decameron 2020 and is a collection of dramatised recitations of stories based in the coronavirus crisis written by authors from around the world.

“Tabish Khair’s story is very close to my heart. Apart from that, I loved the idea of authors using their creativity and joining hands in this period of crisis to make actors enact their pieces”, Azmi told the newspaper about recording Professor Tabish Khair’s story, River of No Return.

“Julian Sands, Stéfi Celma, Michael Alone, Pascal Greggory and Luigi Lo Cascio are some of the other actors involved”, she added about Decameron 2020.

The actress also spoke about how collaborating with others and working via a virtual medium was something she couldn’t have fathomed earlier. “From setting up the lights, fixing the phone on a tripod, arranging for a green screen to recording, I had to do everything myself and it was a challenge. Thankfully, my brother is a DoP and he sent the equipment and his colleague to help me out. I am so used to big cameras and people around me, but here I had to even okay my own takes”, she said.