Her lens, new cinema

Anuparna Roy’s Best Director award at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in 2025 for her debut, Songs of Forgotten Trees, marks a shift. For decades, Bollywood has been dominated by male directors and producers. Women were relegated to films about sacrifice and family. This shaped not only who told stories, but how they were told. Bollywood’s classic melodrama reinforced patriarchal norms and silenced women’s experiences.

A new wave of women filmmakers is changing this. Their work is reconfiguring cinematic form, ethics, and politics.

Films such as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Roy’s Songs of Forgotten Trees, Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s Nil Battey Sannata, and Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish show how women directors are imagining Indian lives differently. These films use compassion as a method. They combine progressive politics with aesthetic innovation. They hold empathy despite odds.

This is not marginal work. It is rewriting Bollywood’s vocabulary and opening space for reimagination.

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These films reflect what Arjun Appadurai calls the “capacity to aspire”. When audiences see marginalised characters not as stereotypes but as complex subjects, they can envision social change. Women directors have experimented with cinematic form in ways that deepen their progressive politics. By using non-linear structures, dreamy soundscapes, and romanticised archetypes, they invite viewers into subjective experiences rather than objective reportage.

By slowing time and priming mood, this cinema cultivates what scholar Kathleen Stewart calls “ordinary affects”: the textures of everyday life that shape how people experience power and inequality. Formal experimentation becomes an ethical choice, refusing the speed and spectacle of commercial cinema for patience, ambiguity, and care. Cinema through “her” lens captures the duration and indeterminacy of lived time rather than subordinating everything to action.

From objectification to subjectivity

Through the “male gaze”, classical cinema constructed women as objects of male visual pleasure. Bollywood romanticised this in song sequences and heroine archetypes. Women filmmakers have disrupted this by shifting the camera’s gaze.

In All We Imagine as Light, Kapadia captures women’s everyday experiences in their expressions, work routines, and silences. The camera moves away from consuming women’s bodies to focusing on their lives. This puts in place what bell hooks called the “oppositional gaze”, a counter-visuality that overturns dominant scripts. Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls strikes a similar note. It portrays a teenage protagonist with awkwardness, humour, and empathy instead of casting her as a sexualised spectacle. By altering the gaze, these films destabilise patriarchal norms embedded in cinematic language.

Compassion has been a defining feature of this wave. Far from sentimentality, compassion is an orientation towards engaging with others’ vulnerability, structuring how audiences are invited to feel. Tiwari’s Nil Battey Sannata carries this in its narration of a domestic worker who enrols in school with her daughter. It highlights structural inequalities without reducing characters to symbolic victimhood. It shows how humour and frustration can coexist. It casts melodrama as an instrument to critique social structures, tying it to structural injustice rather than private suffering.

Shinde’s English Vinglish depicts how everyday humiliation erodes women’s dignity and how simple achievements restore agency. Instead of triumphalism, the narrative emphasises what Raymond Williams called “structure of feeling”, a sensibility that acknowledges women’s struggles within domesticity.

Progressive politics in narrative form

Women filmmakers have changed not only the messages, but the ways in which they are communicated. Roy’s Songs of Forgotten Trees uses long takes and minimal dialogue, privileging atmosphere over plot. The patience it demands matches its politics, where migration, marginality, and memory are imagined in everyday realities that deserve time and attentiveness. The film offers passive resistance to melodramatic shortcuts, a political stance against hegemonic cinema that flattens marginalised lives into spectacle.

Santosh follows a widow navigating precarious work and gendered exploitation. The film premises itself on the nuances of everyday survival without falling prey to portraying it as heroism. This moves away from the aspirational fantasies that characterise Bollywood. The progressiveness lies in foregrounding care work, widowhood, and invisible labour, subjects obliterated in mainstream cinema.

Iqbal’s Dhadak 2 shows how feminist film analysis can transform mainstream genres. The film recentres caste and class as inescapable structures that shape and impede love. Even while framing romantic melodrama with song sequences and youthful desire, the film resists erasing violence carved into societal structures. Borrowing from Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism”, the film uses familiar forms to forward a critique of oppressive systems.

The film asks audiences to feel compassion not only for its protagonists but for the systemic injustices they confront. This reframing transforms empathy from an apolitical emotion into a politically charged affect, forcing viewers to reckon with how caste oppression structures intimate choices. Iqbal demonstrates that compassion and progressive critique can thrive within commercially viable genres.

Many of these films embody the feminist “ethics of care” found in the writings of Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto. The care framework emphasises relational interdependence, empathy, and attentiveness to vulnerability, suppressing dominant ethics of autonomy and conquest that underpin Bollywood’s obsession with heroic masculinity. These emotions appear in Nidhi Saxena’s Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman and Bonita Rajpurohit’s If You Know You Know. These films highlight vulnerability —loneliness, desire, grief—without resolving them into neat arcs. They remind us that these emotions deserve dignified cinematic representation. This storytelling challenges masculinist assumptions and rescripts cinema as a medium for shared vulnerability rather than heroic transcendence.

Compassion and cinematic revolution

The recent surge of films by women directors marks a paradigmatic shift in how Bollywood narrates, frames, and feels. Kapadia’s poetic All We Imagine as Light, Iqbal’s socially conscious Dhadak 2, Tiwari’s empathetic Nil Battey Sannata, and Shinde’s portrayal of dignity in English Vinglish are beacons of hope for a cinema rooted in compassion and progressiveness. By reorienting the gaze, foregrounding care, experimenting with form, and expanding representation, women filmmakers are transforming cinema into a more ethical, inclusive, and imaginative space. They show that compassion, subjectivity, progressive politics, and agency in everyday experiences are not weaknesses but a radical mode of critique that exposes structural injustice while dignifying human vulnerability.

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These advancements do not remove the obstacles women filmmakers face in financing, distribution, and marketing. Sometimes termed niche and at other times grappling with concerns about commercial viability, their challenges are systemic. The hope is that even amid these struggles, women filmmakers are negotiating with industry constraints rather than being excluded. Their experiments testify to creative resilience.

Women filmmakers are spearheading an undeniable shift in popular consciousness. As they move beyond the silver screen to film festivals, streaming platforms, and award podiums, they are creating audiences and training conventional ones to see differently—to notice silences, respect interior lives, and recognise the politics embedded in everyday emotion. Women filmmakers are not just crafting films. They are remaking the vocabulary of Indian cinema.

Khushboo Srivastav is Guest Faculty for Public Policy at the University of Mumbai. Mrudul Nile is a Professor in the Department of Civics and Politics at the University of Mumbai.