A seven-year-old in 1990s Goa wants a baby brother, and someone has told him the only way to get one is to make his parents kiss. That's the whole engine of Little Thomas, the children's film Anurag Kashyap has backed, and it now has a date. October 23.

Directed by Kaushal Oza, the film stars Gulshan Devaiah and Rasika Dugal as the quarrelling parents, with child actor Hridansh Parekh playing Thomas, who's decided their marital cold war is a problem he can personally fix. The production brings together Luminoso Pictures, Civic Studios, Good Bad Films and Ranjan Singh's Flip Films alongside Kashyap.

For Kashyap, this is a genre departure worth flagging. He hasn't made anything for children since 2007, when he directed the animated Return of Hanuman. Little Thomas is his return to that space, this time live-action and considerably more domestic in scale.

Devaiah called it the cutest project he's worked on, describing it as a warm story about an ordinary family in Goa and praising his time on set with Oza and Dugal. Dugal, for her part, made the case for why the film needed to exist at all. She pointed out how few children's films get made in India right now, and fewer still that don't condescend to their young audience. Little Thomas, she said, is built without unnecessary frills, a film kids can watch and adults can enjoy just as much.

Anushka Shah of Civic Studios framed the backing in similar terms, calling it a charming, funny answer to a question every kid eventually asks, and one meant to plug a real gap in the market for quality children's cinema here.

Oza, who says the story draws on his own childhood, described the shoot as full of energy the young cast brought to set, energy he believes comes through on screen. He's promising the film will get you laughing and possibly reaching for a tissue too.

Producer Ranjan Singh went further, framing Little Thomas almost as a corrective. In a landscape dominated by fast cuts and high-adrenaline releases, he said, this is meant to be the opposite, a simple, sweet watch built for the whole family to sit through together.

Whether that pitch finds an audience in a market that doesn't exactly reward quiet, gentle films at the box office is the real test here. Children's cinema in India rarely gets a wide theatrical push of this kind, which makes October 23 as much an experiment as a release date. The film opens nationwide that Friday.