A Place In the Picture

She grew up in Barrackpore, about 20 km from Kolkata. He grew up in Silvepura, a village near Bengaluru, where his mother ran an experimental school for 40 years. They met at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. She was a year junior to him, an editing student, and he stud­ied cinematography. They enjoyed the same movies, and started thinking of making Baksho Bondi ten years ago. It’s a story they filmed over 22 days but it carries their life experiences. Co-direc­tor Tanushree Das says she has seen women like Maya, who is the core of Baksho Bondi, throughout her life. “My maternal grandmother who was mar­ried at eight and had her first child at 13 was like Maya. She raised children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, she could have done anything. Even my mother, in a different world, she could have been an entrepreneur.”

Played by a radiant Tillotama Shome, Maya is struggling to stay afloat. Her middle-class family has never forgiven her for marrying for love, an Army veteran suffering from PTSD. She irons clothes for families, works as a housemaid, and dreams of setting up her own business, even as she keeps trying to get her husband some work, and a better life for her young son. Through her heartbreaks, big and small, Das, and her husband, who wrote the screenplay, Saumyananda Sahi, tell a story that resonated at the Berlin Film Festival where it premiered. “A young woman held my hand, sob­bing; another woman, older, thanked me for telling the story. A soldier told us Maya’s husband’s character, Sundar, resonated with him, because there were things he had done he could never share with anyone.”

The film has an unusual history, funded and supported at every mile­stone by a filmmaker friend, whether it was Sidharth Meer, who lent them his studio free of cost, or musician Naren Chandavarkar who connected them to Shome, actor Jim Sarbh who helped with the prep and shoot or Vikramaditya Motwane and Nikkhil Advani who introduced them to their networks. At a time when funding for independent cinema comes only from global grants or eq­uity funding, with local grants in India drying up, Das and Sahi’s new way of community indie filmmaking may well help the greater cause—of finding new voices and funding new visions.

Key to this are women filmmakers, who have been empowered by the streaming boom, which is sadly peter­ing out with tighter budgets and more focus on established stars. Shefali Bhushan, who co-directed Guilty Minds (2022) for Prime Video, and produced husband Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal, says the boom allowed more women to take the lead. Adds Arati Kadav, the director of the much-loved Mrs, which is on Zee5, “Streaming is where a lot of women go to, to become directors because it was perceived as less risky than a theatrical release.”

Kadav who also made the sci-fi film, Cargo (2019) went to IIT Kanpur and worked in Microsoft in Seattle before learning filmmaking at Whistling Woods, Mumbai. She says she must work twice as hard to go half as fast as a man. “I have to keep justify­ing myself,” says Kadav, “even when I am clearly the person in command. Gender influences how the world sees me, and also how I see the world.” Mrs, a remake of The Great Indian Kitchen, a 2021 Malayalam film, was her tribute to the mothers and aunts in her world, to the sacrifices they made, to their unrecognised hard work, to the lives they never had.

Telling real stories, paying it forward (Kadav hired a debutante pro­duction designer, a young woman, not only because she is good, but because she wanted her to get a foot in the door) and amplifying the female gaze are just some aspects of these women filmmakers who are not afraid to be vulnerable or to bare their emotions.

When she was growing up in Digboi, Assam, an oil refinery town with two cinema halls, she didn’t imagine she would one day be mak­ing movies for the big screen. But like the superboys of Malegaon, she had a dream that was nourished and nurtured by the movies she saw and the teachers she met (among them P Sainath and Jeroo Mulla at Mum­bai’s Sophia College for Women). Reema Kagti, one half of Tiger Baby Films, with Zoya Akhtar, has just directed the magnificent Superboys of Malegaon, based on the story of Nasir Shaikh, first chronicled in Faiza Ahmad Khan’s documentary Super­men of Malegaon (2008). “Zoya and I have wanted to tell Nasir’s story for over a decade now. We saw it as that Indian film which was very local but travelled globally,” she says. “In many ways,” adds Kagti, “Nasir and I are products of piracy. He was watching the same films I was in Digboi, star­ring Bruce Lee, Amitabh Bachchan and Charlie Chaplin.” Both were small-town children with no agenda except a love for the movies.

Today, Superboys of Malegaon has a limited theatrical release in India but also in the US, UK, Ireland and Austra­lia, through Amazon MGM Studios. For Kagti, somewhat jaded after over two decades in the industry, it was re­freshing to deal with a DIY filmmaker, and his story of strong community bonds and lifelong friendships. Kagti has made the accomplished Honey­moon Travels Pvt. Ltd, 2007; Talaash, 2012; and Gold, 2018, apart from the series Dahaad on Prime Video and co-creating two seasons of Made in Heaven, again on Prime Video, yet Superboys of Malegaon with its celebration of cinema as art, as magic and as immor­tality, feels special.

It’s the same magic that makes Rima Das return to her roots in Assam repeatedly to make movies. From the young woman who wants to sing and own a guitar in her breakout feature film Village Rockstars (2017) to her journey onwards in Village Rockstars 2 this year, from the young­sters in Bulbul Can Sing (2018) who want to love on their own terms to Tora’s Husband (2022) about her family during the pandemic, Das’ movies have always filmed the so-called little people. Growing up in Chaygaon near Guwahati, in a world full of books and learning thanks to her headmaster father, Das went to Mumbai to become an actor. A stream of rejections would have broken her spirit had her family not supported her. It also allowed her to rediscover her homeland, and the result is a career that has taken her all over the world as the unofficial ambas­sador of Assam.

If 2024 was the year that the world took note of Indian women filmmak­ers with Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light and Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, then 2025 may well be the year that other brave women find their feet. Geetu Mohandas is directing Yash in Toxic, a big budget, action-studded, tentpole movie usually reserved for men. Mohandas’ gritty thriller Moothon (2019) has a big fan following. Rao has set up her own production house since her divorce from actor Aamir Khan and what she creates will be worth watching. There are several women di­rectors like Alankrita Shrivastava (Lip­stick under My Burkha, 2016, and Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, 2019) and Ruchi Narain (Guilty, 2020, and the series Karrmma Calling, 2024) who have done great work when streaming platforms were actively commission­ing for diversity and inclusivity.

Says Kagti, “We are given to believe that there is no space for new actors and new ideas but you can’t encourage only one kind of cinema. It’s demoralis­ing for people. We have to encourage all kinds of films. It’s important for audiences to go to the theatres to con­sume cinema the way it needs to be, a collective experience.”

And as the theatrical release of Sthal shows, there is appetite for all kinds of stories. Bhushan is one of the four pro­ducers of Sthal, apart from Karan Gro­ver, Riga Malhotra, and Somalkar, and is working on a film and a series. “I am hoping they will go on the floor soon, but the industry is so uncertain,” she says. There are two projects of other producers which she will be directing. “As a filmmaker I feel it has become more difficult to make anything now. The platforms are turning towards larger production houses, and varied voices are finding it more difficult. Yet there is a movie like Sthal, but I wish we could go back to the time when stream­ing platforms were more open.”

There may be no equality in num­bers, but women directors are much more normalised now. As Kadav says: “OTT was instrumental in giving op­portunities to a lot of newcomers, but a level playing field? That is some time away.”

Arati KadavBollywoodcinemaReema KagtiTanushree Daswomen filmmakerswomen issue 2025