An Afghan asylum seeker named Babak is pushed out of his temporary housing in Germany to make room for Ukrainian refugees in “Babak,” the next project from Payal Sethi, director of the upcoming “Kurinji.”
The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).
Among the new arrivals are Alena and Viktor, her son of eight, still waiting for news from the front about the boy’s father. While Babak fights to bring his own family over safely, he and the boy grow close, and Viktor’s longing for a father stirs feelings Babak has long suppressed. As red tape tightens around him and he edges toward illegal options, Babak faces a choice about how far he will go for the people he loves.
Sethi started writing after reading reports of Afghan refugees being moved out of temporary shelters as Germany took in large numbers of Ukrainians escaping the war. What caught her attention, she says, was two groups, each uprooted from home, suddenly being ranked against each other by need.
The story’s origins run deeper, to Rabindranath Tagore’s “Kabuliwala,” which Sethi read as a child, and to her grandfather, who moved from Lahore to Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the partition of India and Pakistan and started over there. “He was a stoic and intimidating figure, but could also be very tender with his grandchildren, and this is the essence of my protagonist too,” she says.
“I want this film to exist beyond the abstract ways through which we often discuss migration – numbers, policies, nationalities, categories of refugees,” Sethi says. “For me, ‘Babak’ is about what survives displacement: tenderness, dignity, humor, the need to belong, and our capacity to recognize ourselves in someone whose life initially seems very different from our own.”
The project is at treatment stage, with Sethi writing the screenplay’s first draft backed by an Asian Cinema Fund Screenplay Grant awarded in July. It was earlier developed at the B3 HessenLab and took part in the EFM Fiction Toolbox. The team is applying for German public funding and looking for co-production and financing partners.
Producer Khaled Homsi of Key Film says he was taken at once with the project’s emotional pull and its distinctive vision. “At Key Film, we focus on cross-cultural stories that bridge distinct worlds, and ‘Babak’ captures that balance with incredible sensitivity,” he says.
In Busan, Homsi wants to meet international co-producers, along with sales agents and equity investors. “We want to build strong strategic partnerships across Asia and Europe as we pave the way toward financing and principal photography,” he says.
“Kurinji,” which received the Kompagnon Fellowship from Berlinale Talents and Perspektive Deutsches Kino in 2022 and won the Co-Production Award at the NFDC Film Bazaar in Goa in 2024, is now in pre-production. The Indo-French-German co-production, backed by the CNC’s Aide aux Cinémas du Monde and MFG Baden-Württemberg, has its lead actors, crew and locations in place and will shoot in Kerala in December.
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