Project Overview
On a sweltering summer day, Kudrat, 30s, witnesses a young girl become the subject of a stranger’s unsettling attention during a crowded bus ride. The film Babygals (bbg) confronts a violence that often begins quietly through small, calculated acts disguised as kindness. I was compelled to tell this story because grooming, and the way it thrives in public, remains largely invisible. It hides behind politeness, age, and male authority. By placing this narrative in a bus, a space of shared silence, unspoken rules, and everyday negotiations, I wanted to amplify the claustrophobia of being watched, followed, judged, and targeted. Kudrat’s reaction is a reflection of the relentless fear women carry with them, even after the bus has stopped. It is the lingering cost of confrontation in a world where the danger does not end with the ride. It follows you.
Expected Impact
babygals addresses a form of violence that is both pervasive yet under-acknowledged: grooming in public spaces. By situating the story in an overnight bus, the film highlights everyday transgressions that women experience but are forced to minimize or ignore. While conversations around sexual violence often emerge only in the aftermath of extreme incidents, this film shifts the focus to the insidious beginnings, the moments disguised as affection and paternal concern. It challenges viewers to recognize these early patterns and the systems of power that allow them to persist unchallenged. Kudrat’s character sums the emotional toll women carry: the hyper-awareness, the guilt, the exhaustion of constant self-protection. In urban India where class, space, and social norms deeply shape how abuse plays out and how it is responded to, babygals contributes to an ongoing conversation around consent, complicity, and gendered vulnerability.
Applicant Background
Aakash Chhabra is a writer-director based in Panipat. He is an alumnus of the Red Sea Director's Program 2025 led by Spike Lee, CHANEL X BIFF Asian Film Academy 2024 - MPA Award and Busan Asian Film School (AFiS) 2022. His shorts have screened at festivals in Winterthur, Poitiers, Tehran, Kerala, Oberhausen and Dharamshala. MINTGUMRI (2021) was nominated for the FCG Critics' Choice Awards 2022 while A WINTER’S ELEGY (2022) featured on the Sight and Sound Magazine's list of Best Video Essays 2022. His recent short film WARM SHADOWS (2025) will premiere later this year on Nowness. He is presently working on his feature-length debut I’LL SMILE IN SEPTEMBER which was developed at the Torino Film Lab’s Red Sea Lodge 2024, Autumn Meeting 2024 and Produire au Sud Nantes 2022. He is a recipient of the reFrame Genderalities Fellowship 2021-22 and the Rough Edges Uncode Fellowship 2022-23.