Payal Sethi brings Afghan refugee drama Babak to Busan market

Germany-based Indian director Payal Sethi will take her next feature, Babak, to Busan's Asian Project Market as she looks for partners to finance it, Variety reported on 9 October. The market is the pitch section of the Asian Contents & Film Market, the industry arm of the Busan International Film Festival. Thirty projects made the cut for the 2026 edition, according to Variety.

Babak centres on an Afghan asylum seeker of the same name who is pushed out of temporary housing in Germany to make room for Ukrainian refugees. Sethi started writing after reading reports of Afghan refugees being moved out of shelters as Germany took in Ukrainians fleeing the war. The script is still early.

The project is at treatment stage, the short prose outline that comes before a full screenplay, with Sethi now writing a first draft. Development is backed by an Asian Cinema Fund Screenplay Grant awarded in July. That grant was one of three script awards chosen from 495 submissions, Variety reported in June.

Babak was earlier developed at the B3 HessenLab and took part in the EFM Fiction Toolbox, a Berlin development programme for filmmakers. It is listed as a Germany/India project and appears as entry No. 3 on the official 2026 Asian Project Market list. The fund's broader 2026 round named 12 recipients across its strands.

Khaled Homsi of Key Film is on board as producer. The team is now applying for German public funding, the regional and national grants that often anchor European arthouse budgets, and is seeking co-production and financing partners. A co-production is a film formally shared between companies in different countries, which can unlock support in each territory.

Sethi's immediate focus is Kurinji, also known as The Disappearing Flower. The Indo-French-German co-production is backed by France's CNC Aide aux Cinemas du Monde and Germany's MFG Baden-Wurttemberg and is scheduled to shoot in Kerala in December. It 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.

What makes this stand out is the route. Festivals such as Busan do more than screen finished films. Their markets connect unfinished scripts with money and partners long before a shoot. For Babak, that work starts now.