iWorld
Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films presents Adhiraj Bose’s Interior Café
NEW DELHI: “Interior Café”, a light hearted film by Adhiraj Bose starring the legend of parallel cinema Naseeruddin Shah and distinguished theatre personality Shernaz Patel is the next presentation by Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films after Sujoy Ghosh’s ‘Ahalya’ and Jaydeep Sarkar’s ‘Nayantara’s necklace’.
Themed on the objective of “keep perfecting”, the Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films is a platform for aspiring directors to feature along with mainstream Bollywood directors and chase their creative energy to establish themselves in the industry. The platform gives a stage to storytellers to showcase their artistic creativity and reach out to their target audience through the online world.
With short films like ‘Last Day’ and ‘Goonj’ to his credit, Adhiraj Bose has explored the nuances of human relationships in a 12 minute time frame where both the lives of the characters revolve around love, loss and reunion. Set in an old school café in Mumbai, the characters of Naseeruddin Shah and Shernaz Patel are shown conversing with each other, thereby signifying the lost love and longing which they have treasured amongst themselves. It is a perfectly told love tale which resonates with the idea of youthful love which had faded away and has come back to find itself again.
Pernod Ricard India Marketing Assistant Vice President Raja Banerji said “Today the approach of filmmaking has transformed completely and being digitally connected has opened up various suitable outlets for filmmakers to express themselves in their own style to the audiences they want to connect to. Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films has built its credibility by collaborating with top Bollywood directors regularly. It is also the most inspiring platform for aspiring directors to showcase their creativity. Resonating with the core philosophy of Royal Stag Barrel Select, the platform is meant to help them keep perfecting their skills and establish themselves in the market. We are very excited to associate ourselves with the relentless creative spirit of Adhiraj Bose’s new film – Interior Café”.
Bose said, “The story of Interior Cafe is an amalgamation of human emotions and what we as humans deal with in some point in our life. As a story, I approached it in a very realistic way, as every short film you see nowadays concludes with a social cause but what excited me to do this project was the opposite. With the legendary Naseeruddin Shah and Shernaz Patel on board I was pretty convinced of the choices I made in this film. As a filmmaker it is very important to have an outlet to showcase your creativity and Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films has truly made this a great experience for me and helped me connect to the audience. I was also excited to work with my long time best friend Shweta Basu Prasad as an actor and producer and my cinematographer Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran who executed his brilliant camera skills in this film”.
Royal stag Barrel Select Large Short Films (LSF) is a portal that is the hub of Indian short films. It gives the audience the window to enjoy short films made by large directors. It gives budding film makers a platform to showcase their short films with large ideas. Pioneered under the aegis of Royal Stag Mega Movies, and Royal Stag Large short Film gains the first mover advantage in a medium that will be the future of entertainment.
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eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
