Girls Will Be Girls, All We Imagine as Light: How feminism, not Bollywood, drew global audiences to Indian cinema in 2024

Smaller American women’s movies that told nuanced reports made headlines in the country and around the world in 2024 as Bollywood struggled to find its foundation.

In May, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light made history by winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival.

All We Imagine As Light has since grown into a giant of independent film, dominating both film festivals and the prizes scene. It has been recognized as the Best International Film by renowned organizations like the Toronto Film Critics Association and the New York Film Reviewers Circle. It has also picked up two Golden Globe nominations, including for Ms Kapadia as ideal producer.

It is also on several best films of the year list, including that of the BBC and the New York Times.

And it has organization.

Director Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age drama Women May Be Ladies won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival. Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies) spent at least two months on the top 10 list of Netflix in India and was picked as the country’s official Oscar entry (a controversial decision). Laapataa Ladies didn’t make it to the Academy’s shortlist. What did make it was British-Indian director Sandhya Suri’s Hindi film Santosh, which had been picked as the UK’s submission to the Oscars.

Is this unexpected burst of victory for Indian movies an artefact or a long-awaited change in global consciousness?

” It’s a culmination of both”, says film critic Shubhra Gupta, pointing out that these pictures were not “made overnight”.

For instance, when they first came up with the idea for the movie, Shuchi Talati, the chairman of Women May Be Ladies, and Richa Chadha, its co-producer, were both in college. ” They have been working on it for years”, Gupta says.

” It’s real serendipity that 2024 became the time these movies were released, igniting meetings together”.

This advantageous position has turned out to be a visual dream. The global impact of these videos is rooted in their value and investigation of common elements like sadness, connections, identity, gender and endurance. These stories opportunity into lands unexplored by conventional Indian cinema with powerful female voices and unconventional female narratives.

In All We Imagine As Light, a picture made in the Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam language, three immigrant ladies in Mumbai manage emotion, endurance and human relationship. The narrative explores themes of isolation and the socio-political landscape, with particular attention to the examination of interfaith Hindu-Muslim relationships as seen with the character Anu ( Divya Prabha ) and her kinship with Shiaz ( Hridhu Haroon ).

Kapadia told the BBC that despite the females in her movies being financially independent, they also face restrictions in their private life, particularly when it comes to matters of passion.

” Love in India is very political,” according to me, and people seem to carry a lot of the alleged respect of the home and the safety of the class lineage. So it becomes problematic if she marries a person of a different race or church. For me, it is really a method to manage people and infantilise them”, she says.

Talati’s Women May Be Ladies explores female adolescence, rebellion and intergenerational conflict through the story of a 16-year-old girl studying at a strict boarding school in the Himalayas and her fractured relationship with her mother, Anila, who struggles with her own vulnerabilities and unresolved emotions.

” It is the kind of coming-of-age movie that we don’t do in India at all”, Gupta says. ” It looks at people from a very attentive, very nice gaze”.

It was never a part of American popular cinema, she adds,” the time when people could experience feelings with and without their body, minds, and without infantilizing the experience.”

Laapataa Women, directed by Kiran Rao, did poorly at the box office, but it received positive reviews from people and critics. Ms. Rao, who was present at a BAFTA testing in London this month, expressed hope for a future wave of these stories, calling the current situation “really specific for women from India.”

A humorous comedy about two married brides who unknowingly get changed on a train due to their veils is her movie. It offers a sharp commentary on sexism, personality and identity functions, a shift from years of male-centred contemporary Indian movies.

After the screening, Bollywood star Aamir Khan, a co-producer of the movie, said,” Many of us who are very patriarchal in our thinking are often that way.” ” But we need to be understanding, at least try and help each other even to come out of this kind of thinking”.

The biggest surprise this year came from the UK, which selected the Hindi-language film Santosh, directed by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri, as its Oscar entry. Shot entirely in India over a 44-day schedule, it featured a largely female crew. Starring Indian actors Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajbhar, Santosh was co-produced by people and companies across the UK, India, Germany and France.

The movie is essentially an Indian tale about violence against women, set as a tense thriller.

Goswami claims that Santosh and All We Imagine as Light’s success points to the fusion of borders and the expansion of film industries, opening up space for cross-pollination and exchange.

” We often think these Indian films require]specific ] cultural context, but they don’t. Any film driven by emotion will resonate universally, regardless of its origins”, she told the BBC.

Three of the films – All We Imagine as Light, Women May Be Ladies and Santosh – share one more common trait: they are cross-country co-productions.

Goswami acknowledges that this might be the future’s formula.

For instance, a French producer gives a film the chance to be seen by a French audience who might follow the producer or the wider film industry. This is how it becomes more globally accessible and relevant”, she says.

Even in Bollywood, some women-led films have had huge success this year. Stree 2, a horror-comedy about a mysterious woman battling a monster who abducts free-thinking women, was the year’s second-biggest hit, playing in cinemas for months.

On streaming platforms, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s opulent Netflix series Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, an exploration of the misogyny and exploitation in the lives of courtesans in pre-independent India, was among Google’s top-searched TV shows of the year.

Their success appears to indicate a growing appetite for these stories, and it shows how well-known movies can address pressing issues without sacrificing entertainment value.

Despite systemic difficulties, 2024 has highlighted the need for diverse stories and the global power of Indian female voices. The Indian film industry could benefit greatly from the momentum in order to gain wider distribution for its independent films and help to create a more diverse and equitable film landscape.