Two of Hindi cinema's most distinctive film-makers are joining forces on a short film. Imtiaz Ali and Anurag Kashyap will present Bobby Beauty Parlour, a coming-of-age story premiering at midnight on 6 August exclusively on the Oh Short Flips YouTube channel, Variety reports.

The film follows Eelu and Manu, childhood best friends spending what may be their final hours together — drinking, napping and bickering inside a neighbourhood beauty parlour. It is a scenario that compresses an entire friendship into a single afternoon's worth of small moments and sharper edges.

Shashwat Dwivedi directs. Janhavi Asthana produces, co-writes and serves as cinematographer, sharing producer credits with Ranjan Singh and Anurag Kashyap. The cast features Adrija Sinha, Parul Rana, Saksham Raj and Preeti Kochar. The film is in Hindi and Punjabi with English subtitles, and was listed in the IFFSA Toronto 2025 schedule, IFFSA Toronto notes.

Ali and Kashyap have known each other since their student days in Delhi, Variety reports. Their creative paths diverged widely — Ali building a reputation for romantic, road-bound dramas like Jab We Met and Tamasha, Kashyap for gritty, sprawling works like Gangs of Wasseypur. Bobby Beauty Parlour brings them together as presenters rather than directors, lending their names to a younger film-maker's vision.

The premiere is timed to Friendship Week. Kashyap's role extends beyond presentation: he curates the short for the Oh Short Flips channel, the same YouTube platform where he curated the short Incognito the month prior, Variety adds. The channel appears to be building a curated strand of short-form work from established names.

What makes the pairing notable is how rare it is. Ali and Kashyap operate in sharply different registers, and their professional collaborations have been virtually non-existent. A short film on a free YouTube channel is an unassuming venue for that first partnership — but the format fits. Short films live or die on a single sustained mood, and both film-makers have built careers on films that trade in atmosphere as much as plot.

For the Oh Short Flips channel, having two of Indian cinema's most discussed directors attach their names to consecutive releases is the kind of signal that pulls in viewers who might otherwise scroll past a 15-minute short from an unfamiliar director. For Dwivedi, it is a significant platform: a debut short presented by film-makers whose own work has shaped a generation of Indian cinema-goers.

Bobby Beauty Parlour goes live at midnight on 6 August on the Oh Short Flips YouTube channel.