There is a scene early in Anureet Watta’s ‘Don’t Interrupt While We Dance’ that has stayed with me since I watched the film last week. A drifting camera moves through a home, revealing the ordinary domesticities it contains — young love in one room, desire in another, two women making tea in the kitchen — the kind of moments we take for granted. Nothing extraordinary happens in this scene. But that is entirely the point. Writer-director Anureet Watta — a queer poet and filmmaker based in New Delhi — has structured their second short film around this very ordinariness: its fragility, its political weight, and the ferocity required to defend it.

The trans-led short film follows a group of queer friends at a birthday party. The party is interrupted by police, who charge the group with “kidnapping themselves” — a real legal mechanism used against queer and trans people in India to compel them back to natal families; sites of violence they've fled. At the police station, the six friends are scrutinised, dehumanised, and painted as deviants. As the state machinery overwhelms them, Safia — the oldest, the one who has experienced all this before — picks up a gun out of sheer desperation. But the film does not end there. It closes instead in a parallel future: what the evening would have looked like, had the party been allowed to simply continue. The answer, as Watta tells it, is nothing much. Ordinary life; laughter; domesticity; the unremarkable pleasure of being together. “Nothing at all,” as the director puts it.

Watta is precise about what they were trying to do with the film’s dual-timeline structure. “I would like the viewers to witness the rage and the resilience that exists within our community,” they say, “but not lose sight of what the end goal is — and that is comfort, that is joy, that is small pleasures, that is not very extraordinary.” The film is careful not to let the violence become the story. The oppression exists, Watta notes, because of a world outside, and the film refuses to grant that world the centre of the frame.

Yani Pratyan Chakrabarty, who plays Noori, the youngest of the group, arrives at that in-between space from a different direction. “It’s not just about two timelines,” Yani says, “but about the fragile, often arbitrary line between safety and danger, intimacy and surveillance, joy and fear, especially for us who belong to the community.” Playing Noori, she was “constantly aware" of how deeply political even the most ordinary desires can become. "Wanting love, softness, domesticity — these shouldn’t be radical things, and yet, for a trans person in India, they often are,” she explains. She hopes the liminal space between the film’s two worlds lingers for audiences as a question: “What does it mean to be allowed a future? Who gets to imagine one freely, and who has to fight for it every single day?”

For music director Geetanjali Kalta, building that space musically meant establishing familiarity first, placing queer lives in the most ordinary, intimate spaces, while showing care, happiness, celebrations, domesticity with chosen families. The score holds that ordinariness tenderly, which makes its rupture all the more sharp. “It shows how deliberately the sense of peace is built,” Kalta says, “and how easily it is threatened — especially by those who claim biological ownership yet fail to understand the very biology they invoke.”

The question of biological ownership and bodily autonomy has taken on a chilling new significance in India in 2026. On March 30, President Droupadi Murmu gave assent to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, which strips transgender and genderqueer people of the right to self-identify — a right that had been firmly recognised by the Supreme Court in its landmark 2014 NALSA v. Union of India judgment. The bill was introduced without meaningful dialogue with statutory bodies such as the National Council for Transgender Persons and cleared both houses of Parliament in under two weeks. In place of the inclusive 2019 definition, the amendment limits legal recognition to historically accepted socio-cultural groups and mandates medical certification for identity recognition, effectively removing trans men, trans women who don’t belong to specified communities, and genderqueer or non-binary people from the legal framework entirely. It also introduces a new criminal offence — up to life imprisonment for “coercing or alluring” someone into being transgender — language so vague it could be used to target support groups, families, and NGOs.

Aakar Patel, Chair of Board, Amnesty International India, described the law as “a fundamental shift in how the state views transgender people. Identity is no longer treated as something inherent, but as something to be checked, certified, and controlled.” The timing also carries its own cruel irony: The law became official on the eve of International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31.

Watta had anticipated this in the very architecture of the film. Safia’s trajectory — the composed, protective, seen-it-all elder who finally breaks — is not a portrait of impulsivity. It is the portrait of exhaustion. “The tipping point comes not because we are impulsive or frivolous,” Watta explains, “but because we’ve lived too many years battling the very same things.” The other characters try to bargain with the state through empathy, legal language, politeness, and directness. None of it works. “Not in the film or in the country.”

Yani, in response to Safia’s eruption, rejects the framing of queer rage as excess. “Rage is not uncontrolled; it’s rather deeply informed. It’s political, but it’s also profoundly personal.” She draws a line between how anger is read on different bodies: when a cis-het man rages in a mainstream film, it reads as authority. When a queer or trans person does, it’s labelled unstable. “We don’t owe anyone neatness,” Yani says. “We can be soft and furious, celebratory and grieving, all at once.” Kalta agrees: “Anger is considered legitimate only when it comes from certain bodies.”

One of the most striking formal choices in Don’t Interrupt While We Dance is its refusal of the tragic ending — a choice that, in the Indian queer cinema landscape, is still not obvious enough to go unremarked.

There is a long tradition of the tragic ending as the only 'authentic' conclusion for queer stories in Indian film. Watta is direct about what that tradition cost them personally: watching film after film that centred the struggle, the inspirational dredging through suffering, minute-by-minute, and then ending there. “On the off-chance we were to survive, where do we lay out our fragile and DIYed lives?” the director asks. “What were we to do with our hands, when the calluses had softened?” The film’s alternate future is not escapism. It is, as Watta frames it, the actual job of fiction: “To imagine a world where we continue to live, where we don’t just arrive here, but also discuss all the places we have to go, and all the other work we have to do in our deeply limited times on this planet.”

Yani makes the politics of this refusal explicit. The tragic ending, she argues, is convenient — it allows audiences to engage with queer lives at a distance, “...to feel moved or sympathetic, without ever having to imagine us as whole, living, desiring people with futures.” A happy or tender ending does not erase struggle; it reframes it. “It says that despite everything, we are still here, still dreaming, still deserving of softness and continuity.” Kalta puts it cleanly: “Being queer is not only marked by tragedy, but also marked by freedom.”

The film was made the way it insists queer life should be allowed to exist: without having to justify itself to an outside authority. The rehearsals dissolved the cast-crew hierarchy. The set was largely queer, which meant no translation was required. For Yani — who comes from modelling — acting for the first time in a project like this was an experience closer to collective remembering than performance. “There was an unspoken understanding, a shared language, that made the process feel incredibly safe and held.” When the story you’re telling is close to your own life, she notes, “the line between performance and memory can blur.” Being held by a queer creative team made that blur something to move through rather than fear.

This is also what Kalta means when she describes the score as being “deeply moved by the people in it.” The music wanted to carry power and anger, but above all, the joy of people standing up for each other — the feeling of finding the care of a home in an unknown city.

In India of March 2026 — where a law now mandates genderqueer and trans identity be checked, certified, and controlled — the world has been barred in again. It has, once more, interrupted the party. What Don’t Interrupt While We Dance insists upon, with its parallel future and its nothing-at-all ending, is the right to keep imagining what the rest of the evening could look like. In this moment, it may be the most political act available to us.

Watch the trailer of the film here:

Follow @dont.interrupt.while.we.dance on Instagram to learn more about the film.

Here’s more from Homegrown:

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