What Anuparna Roy’s win at Venice Film Festival means for indie women filmmakers

She dedicated the award “to every woman who’s ever been silenced, overlooked, or underestimated,” and then, in a breath that startled the festival hall, she pivoted sharply on Palestine: “Every child deserves peace, freedom, liberation, and Palestine is no exception. I don’t want any claps for this. It’s a responsibility at the moment to stand by Palestine… I might upset my country but it doesn’t matter to me anymore.” Later, defending her choice to use the platform politically, she was blunt: “If I have a mic and I’m not talking about these uncomfortable things, I won’t consider myself a global citizen. I’ll be just a random bourgeoise ignoring everything possible happening around.”

Roy’s win tells us the tale of a larger shift that has been building quietly but surely over the last decade in Indian cinema: the arrival of independent women directors who are reshaping the grammar of film, expanding the subjects cinema dares to look at, and breaking into spaces that have long been dominated by auteurs around the world, both young and old.

The women experience

In one sense, Roy’s Venice triumph is a deeply personal journey. Born in Purulia, she carried the textures of her childhood landscapes into the film’s DNA. Starring Naaz Shaikh and Sumi Baghel, the film is set in Mumbai, where Thooya — a migrant woman and aspiring actress — supports herself through part-time sex work and by renting out an apartment she uses (provided by a benefactor).

To make ends meet, she sublets her flat to Swetha, another migrant who works a corporate job. Initially, their shared space is merely a matter of convenience, but over time what begins as co-habitation develops into unexpected affinity: empathy, small care, and shared silences.

Also read: Nidhi Saxena on Secret of a Mountain Serpent, a film about women’s desire, loneliness

As the story progresses, their personal histories, traumas and desires begin to surface, challenging their fragile bond. The film shines in moments of subtle emotional shifts: how survival in a hostile, indifferent metropolis forces intimacy and solidarity, but also puts pressure on identities and past wounds. Cinematically slim and intimate (at 77 minutes), Songs of Forgotten Trees uses the city’s anonymity and noise as backdrop to explore longing, loneliness, and the ways women carve connection under constraint.

But, in another sense, Roy’s win is collective. It adds to a growing list of Indian women who are using independent cinema as their raison d’être. Last year, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light created history at the Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix. A clutch of other indie women filmmakers like Rima Das, Shuchi Talati, Nidhi Saxena, Subhadra Mahajan, Lakshmipriya Devi, Rajni Basumatary and many others have all made films in which female experience has been chronicled using indie grammar.

Changing the perception

Independent cinema in India has always existed in tension with the mainstream. Bollywood, with its song-and-dance fares and star-driven logic, has historically dominated screens, funding, and imagination. Indie cinema has had to fight for resources, distribution, and attention. For women filmmakers, that battle has been doubly hard. The industry is still male-dominated; women are often slotted into ‘safe’ genres or trivialised as storytellers of the domestic.

Indie women directors are actively resisting this pigeonholing. Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (winner of the Golden Eye for Best Documentary at Cannes in 2021) and All We Imagine as Light are unapologetically political. Rima Das’s Village Rockstars was shot almost single-handedly in Assam and went on to be India’s Oscar entry. Its sequel, Village Rockstars 2, which had its European premiere at Berlinale in 2025, revisits Dhunu, the young protagonist, now in her late teens living in rural Assam.

Also read: Kani Kusruti interview: ‘Win for All We Imagine As Light at Cannes feels like a dream’

Seven years on from the first film, Dhunu still carries her childhood dream of being a guitarist in a rock band, but reality presses in: her mother is ailing from hard labour, her village has expectations she can’t always meet, and the pull between her youthful aspirations and the duties life demands grows more acute. The film tracks how she negotiates this tension — between nature and human toil, between innocence and responsibility, between dreams and scarcity — with subtle lyrical beauty. Das continues to work in her signature style: largely natural light, non-professional actors, long sequences with minimal cuts, a deep listening to nature, and a storytelling mode that holds raggedness without sentimentality.

Sexual awakening and female desire

Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls (2024) — a coming-of-age story set in a Himalayan boarding school — was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for World Cinema Dramatic. The film was also screened, among other festivals, at the Busan International Film Festival, and the Transylvania International Film Festival, where it won the Transilvania.

Tender and frank about adolescent desire, and careful about mother-daughter tension, Talati’s film tells the story of 16-year-old Mira (an assured Preeti Panigrahi) who becomes the first female head prefect and grapples with her first romance, her strict good-student identity, and a complicated relationship with her mother, who is also coming to terms with her own unrealised youth. Shot by a largely female crew, the film captures teenage sexual awakening and intergenerational tension with sensitivity, refusing shame, judgement, or easy moralising, instead turning its gaze on intimate moments of desire, friendship, and power in small gestures.

Nidhi Saxena’s Secrets of a Mountain Serpent (2025) had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival under the Biennale College Cinema program. Produced by Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal’s Pushing Buttons Studios along with Forest Flower Films, the story is set in a small Himalayan town in the late 1990s, during the Kargil War. It follows Barkha (Trimala Adhikari), a young schoolteacher whose husband is away at the border. In his absence, her days are filled with silence and waiting, until the arrival of a stranger, Manik Guho (played by Adil Hussain), stirs something new. The film mixes myth, desire, and the loneliness of the mountains, asking what happens when a woman dares to dream and want more than what society allows her.

From the margins

Himachal Pradesh-born filmmaker Subhadra Mahajan’s debut feature-film Second Chance (2024) has its world premiere was at the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival under the Proxima Competition, followed by screenings at Busan, AFI Fest, São Paulo, and other major festivals. The film, shot in black and white, partly in English, Hindi and Kullavi, tells the story of Nia, a woman in her mid-twenties who, after a traumatic abortion, retreats to her family’s summer home in the Himalayas to heal. Left alone, she finds unexpected friendship with Bhemi, a 70-year-old mountain woman, and Sunny, a mischievous little boy. The landscape, silence, nature, and the bond with these two help her slowly reclaim parts of herself that grief had taken away.

Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong (2024), the first fiction film from Manipur to be featured in the Discovery section of Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), is a warm, moving story about a young boy trying to bring his family back together. Set in the village of Khurukhul in Imphal West and the border town of Moreh, the film follows Boong (played by Gugun Kipgen) as he sets out to find his missing father, who has been away without a word. It’s inspired by the folk tales the director heard from her grandmother, and it captures both the sweetness of childhood and the pain of loss, especially against the backdrop of Manipur’s ethnic tensions. Boong ropes in local voices — community members, new actors — and is shot in real landscapes to tug at what it means to belong, to hope, and to try to hold onto your home when everything feels unstable.

Rajni Basumatary’s Gorai Phakhri (Wild Swans in Bodo language) premiered at Vancouver in 2023 and then travelled festival circuits. Set in the foothills of Bodoland in Northeast India, it tells interwoven stories of women living under the twin pressures of patriarchy and militarisation. The film follows Preeti, a doctoral student from the city, who comes to the village for fieldwork and is forced to confront harsh realities — widows raising children alone, a mother labelled “unclean” after sexual violence, strained friendships broken by loss, sacrifices and shame.

With an all-female cast (Helina Daimary, Sangeena Brahma, Mithinga Narzary, Anjali Daimari) and much of the crew also women, Wild Swans weaves together grief, resilience, and solidarity in a place scarred by conflict. It earned awards at Stuttgart and Nepal among others, proving that films in India’s minority languages can get an international life if festivals give them room. These trajectories are important because they suggest distribution pipelines are gradually corralling attention toward the periphery, the margins, and not only metropolitan India.

The power of small stories

Roy’s win is thus a validation of the small. It tells young women directors that you don’t need stars or big budgets to make a film that would be among the best in the world. You need honesty, craft, and persistence. Indie women filmmakers are increasingly gravitating toward small stories. These films are big in their own ways because they expand the canvas of what counts as cinema.

Also read: All We Imagine As Light review: Payal Kapadia’s bittersweet love poem to Mumbai

Also, for too long, Indian cinema on the global stage has been represented by sanitised Bollywood exports, detached from political urgency. Indie women directors are changing that. Kapadia’s films, for instance, are openly political. In the works of many of these indie women directors, you get a sense why cinema must not look away.

Roy’s Venice win will, eventually, mean that distributors and producers who once hesitated to invest in smaller, risk-laden stories are now forced to pay attention. Festivals, too, will inevitably widen their gaze, not only scanning India’s established arthouse names but actively seeking out new, unheard voices from towns, villages, and other forgotten corners. This shift had already begun in 2021 with Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing winning at Cannes, but Roy’s breakthrough at Venice reinforces that moment as part of a bigger change rather than a lone spark.

The real challenge at home

For women filmmakers, the impact could be huge. For long, they have had to fight against an industry that sidelines women and against the commercial stranglehold of mainstream Bollywood. Roy’s success shows that their stories, whether intimate or political, resonate across borders. It nudges funders to place their bets differently, to support the kinds of films that challenge tradition rather than reproduce it. If Kapadia lit the first flare in a dark field, Roy and others are turning it into a bonfire that others can gather around. Her win, one hopes, would make it harder for gatekeepers to pretend these voices don’t exist. What follows may well be a tide of Indian women’s cinema rushing outward, carrying with it fierce experiments, stories rooted in India's diverse regions and dialects, and ways of seeing the world.

Having said that, the real test for such filmmakers begins at home: distribution, audiences, sustainability. Will Songs of Forgotten Trees be released in Indian theatres or on streaming platforms? Will it find audiences beyond the festival circuit? Will it inspire producers to invest in her next project and in other women like her? These are open questions, and they showcase the tenuous ecology of indie cinema in India. For every Roy or Kapadia, there are dozens of filmmakers whose work never sees the light of day. Winning a prize is only one step; building a system that consistently produces and sustains such voices is the bigger challenge.

But if Cannes and Venice form an indication, the appetite is there. International audiences are hungry for Indian stories told differently, without clichés and stereotypes. Women indie filmmakers are uniquely positioned to fill that hunger because their stories emerge from places mainstream cinema ignores. Roy carries the tag of being the first Indian woman filmmaker to win the said category at Venice film festival, much like Kapadia carried the tag of being the first Indian to win Cannes’ Grand Prix. Such firsts open doors and also raise expectations.