Oct 14, 2026 1:51pm IST
‘Aman’ Review: A Powerful Trans Drama Challenging The Boundaries Of Gender, Identity And Family
Two remarkable Indian shorts had a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival TIFF’s Short Cuts— Shaunak Sen’s “Termite” and Rahul Roye’s “Aman.” Roye’s third short, after “Man & Wife” and “A Lullaby for Yellow Roses,” “Aman” explores what happens when a trans man discovers, on the eve of his gender-affirmation surgery, that he is pregnant. Thrillingly, real-life trans people—Kabir Mann and Sirat Taneja play the trans leads—it is relatively rare for an Indian film to achieve this, and still be selected at an A-list festival like TIFF. The 16-minute film is an international co-production in Hindi and Bengali.
Aman (Kabir Mann), who has a male lover (Guntajdeep Singh), must cope with two devastating discoveries: his pregnancy and an upheaval in a relationship. A pregnancy is a defining experience for a woman: it is a body Aman wants to leave behind; but his lover wants Aman to delay the surgery in becoming a man. So the past and future collide in Aman’s being, throwing his future in jeopardy.
The brilliant direction and screenplay—the latter by Roye and Elle Leon Nostas—are finely tuned to Aman’s emotional truths, as his life, going into freefall, is anchored by Sirat, his practical trans woman housemate. Moreover, we wonder if the pregnancy could have been weaponized by a man for ulterior motives. The film also underlines how your chosen family can stand by you when your biological family abandons you.
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Kabir Mann puts in an explosive performance as Aman, while Sirat Taneja is terrific as Sirat; she was also the protagonist of Deepa Mehta’s docu-feature “I am Sirat” (TIFF 2023). By normalizing a trans person in a regular job—Sirat is a nurse at a hospital—Roye shows that utopia is well within reach.
The film is a powerful pushback, given India’s Transgender Persons Amendment Act 2026, which has replaced the self-identification provision with an inhumane institutionalized identity certificate to be issued by a medical board and a District Magistrate. Policing of queer/non-binary bodies and hate crimes continue: Punjabi queer social media influencer and makeup artist Madhusudan “Mad” Sandhu, 30, was shot dead as recently as October 3, 2026, in Amritsar, Punjab, by two assailants on a motorbike. Aman’s multiple realities show precisely why non-binary people cannot be narrowly identified and boxed.
Transylvania-born Tamas Meder’s cinematography is compelling, as it evokes a life lived on the edges of uncertainty, while Anadi Athaley’s editing honors its emotional truths: it seems like there’s a feature film waiting to emerge. This brilliant film has a raft of mostly top-notch producers, including Apoorva Bakshi, Abid Aziz Merchant, Elle Leon Nostas, Tushar Tyagi and Neeraj Churi, while Executive Producers include Nikkhil Advani and Dominique Welinski. The women crew include producer Apoorva Bakshi, Executive Producer Dominique Welinski and co-producer Monisha Thyagarajan. “Aman” is also backed by the Sumitra Gupta Foundation for the Arts and the Kashish Q Drishti Film Grant, presented by the Kashish Arts Foundation, with additional support from Renuka Shahane and Lotus Visual Productions.
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