IRL (In Real Life) (2026)

Two women in urban India — a domestic worker and a beautician — form a nightly ritual inside the mobile combat game BGMI. Behind customized avatars, they navigate a virtual battlefield that doubles as a private sanctuary, where voice chat becomes a space for confessions, role-play, and fleeting intimacy impossible in their offline lives. The documentary blends observational footage of their daily labor with in-game sequences, tracing how digital anonymity lets them test versions of themselves that reality suppresses.

As their online friendship deepens, the line between performance and truth blurs. The film asks whether liberation found in a corporate-owned game can ever be more than temporary escape, or if the avatar itself becomes another kind of cage.