IDFA 2025 | Auto Queens Review: Tamil Doc Spotlights India’s First Female Auto Driver Collective

Sraiyanti’s Auto Queens finds seams of shared humanity in the grind of city life. The compellingly perceptive short documentary, which premiered in competition at the 2025 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), swoops on Chennai’s women auto drivers, holding up strength and reassurance in solidarity. Hunched together, the women can try to expand spaces for existing in. The film follows two of them, Leela Rani and Mohana, who’s also the president of the state’s first trade union for women auto drivers, Veera Penngal Munnetra Sangam (VPMS).

Sraiyanti jogs between Mohana’s measured stance and Leela’s swelling rage. Mohana is more reserved whereas Leela is fearlessly, exuberantly expressive. Both very well understand each other. Unapologetic and brittle, Leela wields fury to shield herself against a broken, ugly, viciously unfair world. She confesses being submissive once, until she flipped, having realized that being bracingly confrontational should be her key attitude. The system of women backing off in the face of intimidation is kept well-oiled by patriarchy. Weary of being told how to behave and what to do, Leela now flings herself forth whenever she’s ticked off. She’s a fuming presence, thrashing out at any bullying. She dons masculinity to navigate the male-dominated space. It’s a survival mechanism that’s hardened her out of easy compliance. “When a woman learns to be arrogant, no one can shake her off,” Leela underlines. Auto Queens fuses Mohana and Leela’s convictions into a clear-eyed indictment of patriarchal design.

Mohana pleads that Leela react with a specific plan. Patience is key, the latter insists. What’s implied is a certain praxis, wherein correctives to the skewed norm must be put into effect. Mohana is determined to dig through and enact proper means for collective redressal. At one point, few men are so bewildered by the sight of women auto drivers they film as if they are erratic spectacle. Leela storms at them, whereas Mohana tries to calmly handle the situation. Auto Queens persuasively inhabits spaces alongside the women auto drivers, connecting to a wider shared experience of working-class women. This structural pushdown echoes across all sectors. It runs the whole gambit, from opportunities denied to regular mistreatment. They have to bear all sorts of bizarre insinuations like being told dealing with fifty male drivers is easier than five of them.

It’s an unyieldingly tough task that weighs heavy. Every moment is a battle the women are locked in. They haggle for fair parking but are constantly edged out. They are reminded again and again this isn’t their arena—that they are trespassing their gender’s social expectation. It’s laced with threats of physical violence. For women drivers to assert themselves, they are to pave through systemic prejudice and humiliation lashed out at their decisions. It means wearing a thick skin to weather it all out and keep doing what they seek. Discouragement is intense, unsparing, cutting into the fiber of their earnestness. How do they live and work when pitted against steep hostility? Leela channels all the dismissal into her arsenal, hitting back instead of resignation. Years of being dominated have only turned the nature of her response more acidic. Politeness has been shed. Auto Queens sharpens focus on how the countering can shift once one has had enough.

Yet, such anger can also leave one utterly spent. This is also what Mohana seems to recognize and caution against. Leela must shore her energy and might which work anyway demands. This fight can be enacted more tactically, without adopting the aggressor’s ways.

Auto Queens mines dialectical liveliness in union conversations. Mohana guides the women to think through oppressions and their root. There’s so much resistance, spite and insecurity they endure, both from men at home and those outside. It’s the intimate people, though, who are the first to impede them from surging forth. So a mass divorce could solve things? Someone playfully suggests.

The camera acutely registers the daily taut atmosphere within which they steer and park. It’s as if every wary move could potentially usher closer the end of their livelihood. The film places the women’s private and public lives in conversation. They jar uneasily, the latter increasingly impinged. Caught between endless hostilities, Leela and Mohana scratch out a spare reprieve at the beach. The film opens with a moment of peace that falls apart. Everything encroaches upon it, especially the male prerogative that yokes every space. Friendship hemming women together primes its own vital resistance. Auto Queens puts this forth with grace and grit.