Megh Patil makes films where obedience turns sour, where expectation becomes a slow form of control, and where people ruin each other in the name of care.

He is a filmmaker from Mumbai and an MFA Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Before AFI, he worked as an assistant director on A Thursday and Netflix’s Mismatched (Season 3), gaining on-set experience across both commercial and streaming projects.

His work blends dark absurdism, unsettling humour, and grounded surrealism. Through misfitting relationships and obsessive routines, he explores the slow violence of familial and societal expectations—what happens when love turns into pressure, and pressure calcifies into silence.

He’s made films about an old hunter who can no longer care for his cannibal daughter, a monastery girl who tries to become a plant to please her mother, and a small-town theatre kid who is humiliated by his big-city mentor. His AFI thesis film, A Superhero’s Father, follows a man with a deformed leg pressuring his superhero son to fix the roof of their ancestral home. It’s about legacy, neglect, and the quiet rot of expectations.

Megh is developing The Pune Initiative, a feature set in Maharashtra, India that interrogates conditional charity and saviour fantasies, and Brown Beach, a TV pilot set in Southern California about an Indian MBA student clinging to the American Dream as ICE closes in.

He’s not here to comfort you. He’s here to press on the bruise.