A short film about a trans man who discovers he is pregnant on the eve of gender-affirming surgery has attracted heavyweight executive producers ahead of its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. Variety reported exclusively on August 5 that Nikkhil Advani and Dominique Welinski have joined Rahul Roye's short film Aman as executive producers, with Stephen Harmaty also serving in that role.

Aman will premiere in the Short Cuts competition at Toronto, which runs September 10–20. The film is co-written by Roye and Elle León Nostas, and shot in Hindi and Bengali. It is a four-country co-production spanning the U.K., the U.S., India and France Variety.

Advani is the director of the Bollywood hit Kal Ho Naa Ho and co-founder of Emmay Entertainment, whose credits include D-Day, Batla House and the Prime Video series Mumbai Diaries 26/11. Welinski's producing work includes Shadowbox, selected for the Berlinale. Both names carry weight on the festival circuit, where a short film's executive-producer attachments can help secure distribution and future festival berths.

The producers are Apoorva Bakshi for Awedacious Originals, Elle León Nostas for Aymara Films, Neeraj Churi for Lotus Visual Productions, and Tushar Tyagi and Abid Aziz Merchant. The film is supported 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.

Kabir Maan makes his screen debut in the title role. The cast also includes Sirat Taneja, Guntaj Deep Singh and Satakshi Nandy. Maan and Taneja are both prominent voices in India's transgender movement; Taneja previously appeared at Toronto in Deepa Mehta's documentary I Am Sirat.

The filmmakers describe the casting as a landmark for transmasculine representation in Indian cinema, with no trans role going to a non-trans actor. The production committed to ensuring that 100% of its cast and crew are queer-identifying or active queer allies.

What gives Aman its wider charge is timing. India's 2026 amendment to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act removes the right to self-identification, strips explicit recognition of trans men, trans women and genderqueer people from the law's definition of "transgender person," and places legal recognition in the hands of medical boards and state authorities. A film about a trans man navigating pregnancy and surgery arrives in that legal landscape — not as a polemic, but as a story about a person living inside it.

Roye's previous short films are Man & Wife and A Lullaby for Yellow Roses. Aman is his third.

Toronto's Short Cuts programme is one of the most competitive short-film slots on the festival calendar. A premiere there puts a film in front of distributors, programmers and sales agents who spend the festival scouting work that may become features, or find international audiences in its own right.