Choreographing Consent: The professionals shaping intimacy on Indian film sets

As intimacy coordinators become more common on Indian film sets, filmmakers are discovering how choreography, consent and collaboration can make intimate scenes more spontaneous

Aastha Khanna Bhardwaj and Parinaz Aga enacting an intimate scene for Ali Fazal and Radhika Madan in Lust Stories 3.

11 min readOct 18, 2026 07:00 AM IST First published on: Oct 18, 2026 at 07:00 AM IST

The cameras were ready, the actors were prepped, and a kiss was on the day’s shooting schedule. But when the moment arrived, both actors froze. Director Ruchir Arun, who was at the helm of the series — he prefers not to name it — found himself in an awkward spot. He did not want to push the actors into doing something they were uncomfortable with. There was no intimacy coordinator then attached to the project to guide them through the scene and they eventually dropped the kiss from the show.

Some years later, when Arun started working on Musafir Cafe, an eight-part Netflix series (2026) that explores the romantic relationship Chandar (Vikrant Massey) shares with Sudha (Vedika Pinto) and later with Preeti (Mahima Makwana), things were different. The director worked with an intimacy director— Neha Vyaso, founder of BraveSpaces India — for the first time. Long before the actors arrived on set, they participated in an intimacy workshop that helped them understand their characters, explore the chemistry between them and develop a shared language of comfort. The exercises also helped them distinguish their characters’ emotions from their own, creating a clearer boundary between the personal and the performed.

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Alaka Sahani is a prominent film critic and journalist based in Mumbai. With a care... Read More