Inside Aakash Prabhakar’s 'How To Not Have Sex', set for world premiere at New York Indian Film Festival

Aakash Prabhakar

If life is a stage, one could say that Aakash Prabhakar has spent the last decade meticulously rearranging the furniture to see how the audience reacts when the room gets too small.

For the founder of the production house, Here And Now, the theatre has always been a laboratory for intimate, emotionally driven storytelling. But this month, the laboratory moves to the New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF), where Prabhakar is pulling off a double-bill that would make any indie filmmaker's heart race.

At the centre of the storm is How To Not Have Sex, the official Indian remake of Richard Linklater's 2001 cult classic, Tape. While the original featured Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, the Indian avatar sees Prabhakar in the lead role of Vikram (originally Hawke's Vince), a man who reunites with two estranged high school friends only to peel back the scabs of a 10-year-old trauma.

How To Not Have Sex is about a man who reunites with two estranged high school friends only to peel back the scabs of a 10-year-old trauma

With Richard Linklater himself on board as an executive producer, Prabhakar and his team knew the stakes were high. "I've been doing theatre for 10 years now, and the stage has been my place to grow," Prabhakar tells us. When the remake was deemed possible and Stephen Belber, the original playwright, reached out to him, the timing felt electric. "The Me Too movement had happened, and nothing happened to most people who were called out.

Can a conversation be held that will help people better understand consent? Help people understand what happens when you blur the lines?" Prabhakar wondered. It's what led to making the film. How To Not Have Sex arrives in 2026, almost a decade since the global Me Too reckoning, and Prabhakar is under no illusions about how much has actually changed in the Indian subconscious.

"A lot of people might seem woke, but they aren't," he says bluntly. "The vocabulary to be woke is very obvious... but deep down, it's still on the surface level. You meet incredibly intelligent people in huge MNCs, but when you hear their opinions on the way women dress, or how many partners they should be with, it's fairly regressive."

This hypocrisy is partly what fuelled the adaptation. To ensure the film didn't fall into the trap of the male gaze, Prabhakar turned to his wife and co-producer, Anshulika Dubey, to lead the writing. "We tried having male writers write. We couldn't get the nuance right," he admits. "The minute you see 20 minutes into a film about women written by men, you're like, ‘a dude wrote this'. The female perspective needed a female gaze to be way more lived-in."

The writing was also key, as the film is a chamber drama - a format that lives or dies on the strength of its dialogue and storytelling. For Prabhakar, the thrill lay in the boisterous, authentic nature of his character, Vikram, a man whose perceptions of women are light-years away from his own.

But how do you keep an audience hooked in a single room? "Kick-ass writing," Prabhakar laughs. "You can't sacrifice on that. It requires beats in place, conflict in place, and morally grey characters, not a hero being a hero and a villain being a villain."

As he prepares for the World Premiere in New York, Prabhakar is reflecting on the very thing his film dissects: masculinity. "It made me question a lot. Everything we have been taught about male friendships isn't right. I still can't imagine going to my childhood friend and saying, ‘I love you.' It's just insane. By seeing the extremity of being masculine [in the role], I could embrace being more empathetic and kind."

Aakash's second entry

While How To Not Have Sex dissects adulthood, Aakash Prabhakar's second festival entry, Notice Me Now, dives into the bruising world of adolescence.

The short film, born from a workshop with writer Sarika, explores bullying and the desperate thirst for visibility in the social media age.

"There's a certain sense of perfection thriving on social media which teenagers are very susceptible to," he says. "These perfect filters are all fake. They don't exist."

Through the film, he hopes to bridge the communication gap between parents and children. "I hope conversations about their heartbreaks are shared openly. Most men in their teens can't share anything with their fathers because of fear. It's very hard to grow when your base emotion is coming out of fear."