STRAY GIRLS | ambarienalqadar 0826

STRAY GIRLS

Narrative Short I 16 min | India US UK | Post Production
Writer-Director: Ambarien Alqadar

Presented by ANURAG KASHYAP

Two 'stray girls' step out into the night in New Delhi, India and discover they have a hidden power.

Presented at

2026 The Queer Pitch, Berlin International Film Festival

Produced By

Anurag Kashyap & Flip FIlms, India

Lotus Visual Productions, UK

Dust Road Films, US

Executive Producer

Full Spectrum Features, US

Notes on Directing: Stray Girls grows from my memories of coming of age in a working-class Muslim neighborhood in New Delhi, where my mother ran a small beauty salon. As a teenager, I watched women and girls move between the expectations placed upon them and the private selves they created through friendship, beauty, desire, humor, and rebellion. Writing and directing from within this community, I am interested in the multiple realities that can exist within a single life and even within a single moment- the intimate alongside the political, pleasure alongside surveillance, faith alongside rebellion. Rather than organizing these experiences through inherited ideas of what a narrative about Muslim girlhood should look like, I wanted the film to remain close to the density and contradictions of the world as I remember it. The film begins within an observed, everyday reality and gradually opens into magical realism. For me, the fantastical is another way of making an interior reality visible. At its heart, Stray Girls is about the moment a girl refuses the identity imposed upon her. The film is both a love letter to the neighborhood that shaped me and a fantasy of the freedom I wanted to see on screen when I was eighteen. Stray Girls was shot on location in the New Delhi neighborhood where I grew up- a place I once hid that I came from while I was in school. Returning there with a camera became its own act of reclamation. Making films in places that remain largely outside the cinematic map brings real logistical challenges. Yet we remained committed to working with local spaces, resources, and crew rather than treating the neighborhood simply as a backdrop. I wanted the process of making Stray Girls to reflect the film itself: cinema created from within a community, through relationships, improvisation, and shared knowledge. For me, filmmaking here is also an act of community-building, an attempt to nurture a culture of making cinema locally and dreaming collectively.

Creative Team

Director of Photography: Prateek Pamecha

Consulting Editor: Anadi Athaley

Editor: Joydip Das

Sound Design & Mix: Moinak Bose

Composer: Michel Mezher

Sound Recordist: Vidhaat Raman

Production Designer: Samiyah Saud