Katti (2026): A 14-Minute Film That Stays With You
Katti is a Hindi-language short film about a girl who watches her family celebrate the arrival of her baby brother — and realizes, in that celebration, exactly where she stands. Released January 27, 2026, it's 14 minutes long, written and directed by Kanishka Aggarwal, and it does more emotional work than most feature films twice its length. If you grew up as the child nobody threw a party for, you'll recognize yourself in this one.
The Setup: What Katti Actually Says
The premise is deceptively simple. A young girl watches her family pour joy onto a newborn boy while she moves through the periphery — noticed, maybe, but not celebrated. The film doesn't scream about gender bias. It whispers about it, the way children actually experience injustice: as something absorbed rather than announced.
The title itself is the story. Katti is Hindi slang for a social freeze between kids — "I'm not talking to you anymore." The alternate festival title, Katti (Unfriend), translates that playground concept into the language of our generation. Except here, the girl isn't being unfriended by peers. She's being unfriended by the one place that's supposed to want her: home.
What strikes me about this approach is how much it trusts the viewer to do the emotional work. There's no monologue explaining what she feels. There's no moment where an adult acknowledges the unfairness. There's just a girl, a room full of people, and the gap between them. That restraint — refusing to spell it out — is what makes it sting.
Festival Life and Where Katti Landed
Katti had its first theatrical run in Australia, then moved through the international circuit as a festival title. The film screened at Sonoma International Film Festival 2026 on March 28 and also played IFFLA 2026 (Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles), one of the biggest platforms for South Asian cinema in North America.
These aren't small-time festival slots. Sonoma and IFFLA are places where industry people actually pay attention — which signals that programmers saw something worth taking seriously. Festival materials describe the film as a drama about how children read rooms, internalize hierarchies that adults pretend don't exist, and somehow still reach for love anyway. That's a more sophisticated pitch than "girl sad about brother."
The budget — approximately $30,000 USD, according to IMDb — makes the craft on screen feel even more impressive. That's modest for any film, especially one that clearly demanded precision in performance and camera work. You can see where every dollar went.
Currently, there's no wide critical consensus yet (Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic don't have aggregated scores for festival shorts at this stage), but the festival pedigree alone tells you the film is being taken seriously. Hard to say if broader critical coverage will follow, but that's not really how short films work anymore — they build through word-of-mouth and festival buzz, then find their streaming home.
Why the Film Works: What Aggarwal Does Right
Director Kanishka Aggarwal keeps almost everything unsaid. The camera stays close — intimate, almost claustrophobic — which means you're watching a girl's face as she processes a room full of people who aren't looking at her the way she needs them to.
Here's what I kept thinking about: children are extraordinarily good at reading subtext. They understand which child gets the attention, whose achievements matter, whose presence is merely tolerated. Most films about childhood pretend kids are innocent of these calculations. Katti knows better. It treats observation as a kind of intelligence, and that's what makes it different.
The 14-minute runtime isn't a constraint — it's a discipline. There's no scene that isn't doing double duty. No moment of filler. It's the difference between a short film and a short story: compressed, precise, and it doesn't leave you until long after it ends.
Without detailed cast information in circulation, it's the direction that speaks loudest. Aggarwal clearly knew what she wanted and trusted her young lead to carry emotional weight that would crush most adult actors. The performances don't feel performed. They feel observed.
Where to Watch Katti Right Now
Katti is available on major OTT services, though availability shifts by region. The easiest way to find it in your area is to check Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker, which updates in real time as platforms pick up titles. Since this is a festival short with limited theatrical distribution, it tends to land on specialty platforms — the ones that focus on independent and international cinema rather than the Netflix-to-multiplex pipeline.
If it's not yet live where you are, set a watchlist alert. Festival shorts like this typically find streaming homes within a few months of their final festival run. Movie OTT tracks that availability across all major services, so you don't have to manually check each one individually.
Who Should Watch Katti
This is for anyone who ever felt like the celebration was happening in the next room. It's for parents willing to sit with discomfort about how they might inadvertently send the message that one child matters more than another. And it's for people who believe short-form cinema can carry real emotional freight — which, after watching this, you absolutely will.
You don't need to know Hindi to feel what Katti is saying. The film communicates in silences and glances and the small ache of being overlooked.
Fourteen minutes. That's barely enough time to finish a cup of tea. Aggarwal uses it to say something most two-hour films never get around to. Check current availability on Movie OTT — the festival window won't stay open forever, and once these films move to streaming, they tend to disappear into the algorithm.
