The year which began in the godawful shadow of a hyper-masculine commercial potboiler released at the fag end of the previous year witnessed men rule the roost on screen in pan-Indian cinema in its first half and then some. These included box office miracles and blunders. Fighter and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (Hindi), Hanu-Man (Telugu), Kaatera (Kannada), Ayalaan (Tamil) and, in Malayalam: Bramayugam, Malaikottai Vaaliban, Manjummel Boys, Premam and Aadujeevitham.
Read: 2024 first quarter Movies Report Card: 6 south films that made noise at the box office
Some were great films save the absence of women and the female perspective. All this while, two Indian women, Shuchi Talati (Girls Will be Girls; feature) and Anupama Srinivasan (Nocturnes; documentary), quietly picked up awards at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 signalling that the year ahead, especially in independent cinema, will be reclaimed by women. A few months later, Payal Kapadia broke a 30-year stalemate for India at the Cannes Film Festival by winning the Grand Prix.
The year marked the golden jubilee or half a century of Shabana Azmi being an actor. Her debut film Ankur (The Seedling) had released in 1974. Hindi cinema wasn’t the same since. The maker of that film, his debut feature, and father of the Indian new wave and parallel cinema, the prolific Shyam Benegal, breathed his last, aged 90, earlier this month. With him, an era of Indian cinema ended. The way Benegal — whose coming divides Hindi cinema into two halves, before and after him — imagined women and their interiority was a rare view. The only other directors to have thought of the woman, like a woman, consistently, would be Bengali directors Aparna Sen and the late Rituparno Ghosh.
This year also witnessed Sharmila Tagore’s return to Bengali cinema after 15 years with Suman Ghosh’s Puratawn (Ancient). Ghosh, an economics graduate turned filmmaker, also released his documentary Parama on Aparna Sen.
One Bengali film that took me by surprise and rekindled my faith in the strength that Bengali cinema once had was debutant Abhinandan Banerjee’s black-and-white Manikbabur Megh (The Cloud and the Man), our very own Indian response to Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023). In Manikbabur Megh, real meets the surreal, sci-fi meets social realism, in the age of men romancing machines on screen, it is ingenious to think of a romance plot between a cloud and an ageing and lonely man (doing chores women have traditionally done: cooking, doing laundry, caring for the old). Yes, there are no physical women here save a quarrelling landlady’s voice, but the cloud is a metonym, standing in for the absent woman as his beloved. From the other side of the border, a film that left a great impact was Saba by Bangladeshi filmmaker Maksud Hossain about a young woman as a caregiver to her paralysed mother and the ebbs and flows in their relationship.
If Sivaranjini’s Malayalam debut Victoria (made with Kerala State Film Development Corporation, or KSFDC, funds for women filmmakers) won the FIPRESCI Award for Best Malayalam Film by a Debut Director at the 29th IFFK (International Film Festival of Kerala), Kinshuk Surjan’s haunting untold story of Maharasthra’s women farmers whose husbands died by suicide leaving their burden on their wives who have been hustling to make ends meet and still with a smile and the will to live, in Marching in the Dark, which won the Gender Sensitivity Award at the 2024 Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF).
Here are the Indian women in cinema who made their mark in 2024:
Payal Kapadia
In the heart of Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL), the story of migrant nurses in Mumbai, is a Pessoa-like disquiet. A lot is said in what is not said but imagined. In May, her debut feature film All We Imagine As Light broke a 30-year stalemate for Indian films by bagging a place in the main Competition for Palme d’Or, the last time India was there was with Shaji N Karun’s Malayalam film Swaham (1994). She went on to win India her very first Grand Prix, the second-highest award at the festival (not to be confused with Palme d’Or’s previous name: Grand Prix du Festival International du Film). AWIAL has also earned historic Best Director Nomination at Golden Globe Awards 2025. The first Indian woman to do so. Shekhar Kapur was the first Indian male director to win a Golden Globe nomination (followed up with an Oscar nomination) for Elizabeth (1998). The film also won Best International Feature at the Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle.
Kapadia is Indian artist Nalini Malani’s daughter. Malani belongs to the first-generation of video artists in India. The multi-discipilary artist Malani was the first Asian woman to win the Arts & Culture Fukuoka Prize in 2013. She was also the first Indian to have a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It was the title of an art work of hers that lent daughter Kapadia the title of her award-winning film: All We Imagine as Light. Unlike the linearity of progression of fathers and sons, where things are passed down from one to the other, there’s a circularity of existence in mothers and daughters, where one’s life and art informs the other and the other reflects that information thereby giving a new life and utterances to the old.
After a global procession, winning awards and accolades, and a theatre run at home and in the world, All We Imagine as Light (AWIAL) will drop on Disney+ Hotstar on January 3.
Anasuya Sengupta
Kolkata-bred Anasuya Sengupta was awarded Best Performance — for Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s film The Shameless — in Un Certain Regard competition segment at the Cannes Film Festival, a first for any Indian actor. Sengupta was the production designer on Masaba Masaba, RAY, Brahman Naman, and returns to acting after 15 years since a bit role in Madly Bangalee. Acting gigs didn’t come her way, Bollywood demanded conventional beauty and actors like her tend to get “easily slotted as unconventional or alternative, you get put into that box…it’s a little bit less now,” Sengupta had told this writer, adding, “In that unconventional slot, there are brilliant actresses whom I both know closely and from afar, my role models are Konkona (Sensharma) and Tillotama (Shome). Tillotama is also a very dear friend, she’s like a big sister, and she’s such a brilliant actor who had to cut through a lot of the ‘industry’ shit and convention. She should have been carrying films on her shoulders for 20 years ago, you know? But for a film crew, to work behind the scenes, it is very much accepting of outsiders like me. I don’t think there is any place quite like Bombay, which is truly cosmopolitan in its design, in its industry, it’s infectious. It also teaches you that you’re not special, you’re just like everybody else. And it’s humbling and essential. I was grateful for that lesson.”
Kiran Rao
Rao returned to direct a film after 14 years, since Dhobi Ghat. If in that film she captured the urbanscapes and urban lives, with Laapataa Ladies (Netflix), she goes rural, into the hinterlands to tell us about women and their lives, far removed from city life. The women’s gaze manifests in the men thus crafted in the film. Film newcomers Nitanshi Goel and Pratibha Rana put up a good show but the showstopper was Manju Mai, played by Chhaya Kadam. Laapataa Ladies was chosen as India’s official entry for the Oscars 2025 but it lost out in that race.
Anupama Srinivasan | Nishtha Jain | Miriam Chandy Menacherry
Indian women documentary filmmakers brought laurels, too. Anupama Srinavasan and Anirban Dutta’s documentary Nocturnes premiered and won at Sundance [World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award (Craft)] and Best Cinematography award for their film ‘Flickering Lights’ at the prestigious IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam). Nishtha Jain’s docu on farmer’s protest, Farming the Revolution, had its World Premiere at Hot Docs 2024 and won the Best International Feature Documentary. And her film The Golden Thread (Paat Katha), on Bengal’s dying jute industry, the Golden Conch at Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF), India 2024. Miriam Chandy Menacherry’s ‘From the Shadows’, on missing girls and girl-child trafficking, won the National Award for Non-Feature Film Direction.
Rima Das
Contemporary Assamese cinema’s most renowned name in the international festival circuit, Rima Das’ cinema reminds of simple life and dreams in small-town India. Her latest film, Village Rockstars 2, co-won the prestigious Kim Jiseok Award for the Best Film, along with Taiwan’s Tom Lin Shu-yu’s Yen and Ai-Lee, at the 29th Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. Earlier this year, she was inducted as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). In her sequel to the National Award-winning Village Rockstars, protaginist Dhunu has grown and so has life’s problems.
Also Read: Rima Das, Kim Jiseok Award winner: ‘Making films like Village Rockstars is my calling’
Kani Kusruti
This year truly felt like this is Kani Kusruti’s world and we are living in it. From playing an irksome mother to a teen girl to playign a nurse living on a prayer and a hopeless truth, burying her dreams/desires in a big city. Girls Will be Girls, All We Imagine as Light, Killer Soup, Poacher, Maharani, Nagendran’s Honeymoon, Mura — all in just one year. Kani (yellow flower), an offsping of liberal and progressive parents who never married but lived together and didn’t give their daughter a last name, adopted Kusruti (meaning mischievous in Malayalam) as her last name only because paperwork demanded it. She’s won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Actress for Biriyaani (2020), not a film she’s too proud of but did it to pay the bills back then. Her film Counterfeit Kunkoo earlier went to Sundance. There’s a natural gravitas in Kani’s demeanour, akin to Smita Patil’s. But much like Patil, mainstream commercial cinema doesn’t know where to fit it. Her silences speak volumes. Here’s someone who can talk with her eyes, that too from the Malayalam film industry, making the playing field an equal one, with Fahadh Faasil at its other end. High time a big-budget film came her way.
Shuchi Talati | Preeti Panigrahi | Richa Chadha
New York-based Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls (Amazon Prime), a coming-of-age film of a teen and her mother, produced by Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal’s company Pushing Buttons Studios, featuring Kani Kusruti and debutante Preeti Panigrahi who bagged the Special Jury Award for Acting at Sundance as the film received the Audience Award in World Cinema Dramatic category. Chadha, who birthed a girl child this year, was herself seen in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s first web-series Heeramandi. Chadha and Fazal also instituted a programme at the Berlinale for female gaffers and that created some job opportunities for them back home.
Chhaya Kadam | Sunita Rajwar
These two women must be truly celebrated. They broke glass ceilings and defied industry’s inherent ageism to display their versatility in roles hitherto unwritten for women. If Chhaya Kadam as Manju Mai (Laapataa Ladies) and Parvaty (AWIAL) knows about the harsh realities of the world for an ageing single woman who must take agency in her hand, her gangster Kanchan Kombdi in comedy-drama Madgaon Express is singular. Kadam brings a playfulness to her characters, even the serious ones. Sunita Rajwar was a revelation as a stone-cold-hearted police officer to convicts yet empathetic senior female cop to her junior fellow-female cop in Santosh, the UK-made film shortlisted in the 2025 Oscars competition.
Sandhya Suri | Shahana Goswami
The UK-based Sandhya Suri has delivered in her police procedural Santosh a bare-eyed systemic rot in India’s police order that guillotines the innocent Muslim as Dalit discrimination meets girl child abuse in a society where the upper-caste rich man can take the law for a ride. Shahana Goswami goes a female Ardh Satya Om Puri meets Gangaajal Ajay Devgn in her titular role in the film (Britain’s entry) that has been shortlisted (in best 15; in which Laapataa Ladies lost out) in the Best International Feature Film category for the 2025 Oscars.
Divya Prabha | Zarin Shihab | Anna Ben
If her characters in Ariyippu/The Declaration (2022) and Family (2023) are a witness to truth but are not believed by the society. Both are about a certain kind of systemic silencing of women, who are victims and witnesses, Divya Prabha’s character Anu in Kapadia’s AWIAL, as a young Malayali nurse in Mumbai is a quiet rebel who tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz. Zarin Shihab as the sole woman amid 12 angry men in Anand Ekarshi’s National Award-winning Aattam. Anna Ben, whom the world first saw in the superb Kumbalangi Nights (2019), delivers a phenomenal performance without a single word in PS Vinothraj’s Tamil sophomore Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl). All their three films show how, in different situations, the noose always tightens around women, even if she’s the victim, in patriarchal societies, where the burden of “purity” lies on women.
Urvashi | Parvathy
Malayalam director Christo Tomy, known for Netflix true crime docu ‘Curry and Cyanide’, brought Urvashi and Parvathy together on the big screen for the first time in his debut feature film ‘Ullozhukku’, shot in a makeshift flood in Kerala. Ullozhukku is essentially a story about a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law who are stranded in a flooded house, and in that, surfaces secrets and truths that both have submerged, secrets about their respective child, one whose life is dimming and the other yet unborn. Lies and deceit that women tell women could have made this film devolve into a melodrama but that’s where Tomy shows his writerly and directorial prowess as both these powerful actors, Urvashi and Parvathy, deliver moments of empathy in an otherwise-seen hostile relationship. Parvathy, when off screen, is one of the champions cheerleading the Women in Cinema Collective, whose four-year-long efforts in steering the #MeToo movement in the Malayalam film industry resulted in the release of the Justice Hema Committee report this year shaking up the industry.
Shraddha Kapoor | Parineeti Chopra
If Shraddha Kapoor continued with her Stree charm with her sequel Stree 2, Parineeti Chopra was a revelation in a film where she acted but also sang the songs, alongside Diljit Dosanjh, playing the Dalit ‘Elvis of Punjab’ Chamkila’s wife Amarjot in Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila.
Mansi Maheshwari | Nidhi Saxena | Subhadra Mahajan
Meerut-born and the UK-based Mansi Maheshwari clinched the third prize at La Cinef (Cannes Film Festival) for her animation film Bunnyhood. Jaipur-based Nidhi Saxena has made a lyrical film about the interior lives, of abhorrence and care, loneliness and dependency, that mothers and daughters share in Busan-premiered Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman. Pan Nalin’s assistant director Subhadra Mahajan has made a graceful first film, spectacularly shot, a restorative Himalayan drama about trauma and travails of unwanted pregnancy and abortion but more than that unlikely friendship/sorority rekindling life.
Also Read: ‘Second Chance’ review: A restorative Himalayan drama on loneliness, healing & unlikely friendships
Plus One: Manisha Koirala | Huma Qureshi
After Bhansali’s Heeramandi, Manisha Koirala has delivered a power performance in Dibakar Banerjee’s Netflix-shelved-and-unreleased film Tees, which also sees one of Huma Qureshi’s career-best performances as Koirala’s Muslim lesbian daughter in the film. Koirala is a middle-class Kashmiri Muslim but she’s also a mother and was a radio presenter. She holds close her house, which gives her a sense of identity and belonging, and lives to see three generations of her blood still struggling: for a house and with their identity. At the sole screening of his film, Banerjee remarked how Koirala has got what it takes to be a “silent film actress: she speaks with her face.”
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