Sushant Nagpal’s Barber of the Gods set for Delhi on September 5 as part of The Big Hoom Club’s Short Film Programme at Mool, South Extension II. Written and directed by Nagpal, the short stars Kumud Mishra and Jaivardhan Lakhera will be presented alongside a selection of independent films.
The screening will be held at Mool, B-17, Basement, South Extension II, Block B, New Delhi 110049. The South Delhi art space has increasingly become a venue for independent cultural programming, including exhibitions and film screenings. The Big Hoom Club, run by Shreya, has been organising community screenings intended to bring independent films to audiences outside conventional theatrical spaces. The present short film programme is travelling across six Indian cities.
Barber of the Gods, which runs for about 20 minutes, moves between a small-town barbershop in 2000s India and a parallel realm rooted in Hindu cosmology. A barber and his son possess the unusual ability to regrow people’s hair in exchange for years from their lives. In the mythological strand, a divine barber and his apprentice tend to the gods. The film uses the premise to look at inherited professions, generational relationships, faith and the weight of tradition.
The film had its world premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival in 2025. It subsequently travelled through a number of independent and competitive platforms, including Do Kahaniyan: A Genre Showcase by Genre X, the Jaipur International Film Festival, where it received a Best Film nomination, and the Ootpatang Festival, where it won for Best Sound Design. It has also screened at the London Indian Film Festival (LIFF) in the UK and at the International Film Festival of Delhi, besides appearances at Dilli Cine Shorts, Call Sheet by Montage and Beyond Perception by Cinergy.
Sushant Nagpal, a filmmaker and theatre director from Haryana, has worked across theatre and cinema, with an interest in magical realism, absurdity and myth in contemporary life. Barber of the Gods is his fiction debut. The film brings these interests together through an everyday setting and a mythological parallel, placing questions of work, inheritance and belief within the familiar space of a neighbourhood barbershop.
At Mool, Barber of the Gods will appear alongside films including Pagal Actor Unemployed, Laude Special Drink, Skinny, A Body Learning Home, Aana Jaana, How Would One Know If One Forgets Something?, Raman Kutty Darpok Nahi!, 6.666… Scars, Danny, Outskirts and Part 2 Side B. The September 5 programme will conclude with a music performance by Aaromal Rajendrababu.
For Barber of the Gods, the Mool screening marks another stop in a festival journey that began at Dharamshala in 2025 and has since taken the film to both Indian and international platforms, before bringing it back to a Delhi audience through a community led screening programme.
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The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and commentator.
