Women’s Day 2026 | Macho No More: Women Directors In Contemporary Indian Cinema

For decades, Indian cinema has been structured around the familiar male gaze. We saw the world with the default lens of a man—a heterosexual cisgendered man at that. Women were omnipresent on screen but rarely central as thinking, feeling subjects. They were the dancing, suffering, sacrificing muses, mothers and objects of desire. Their physicality as well as interiority appeared on screen as interpreted by men. The camera watched them, but seldom to look at how they saw things. Filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Rituparno Ghosh, Deepa Mehta and Kalpana Lajmi became the outliers.

However, something has shifted in the last few years. A new generation of women directors is not simply telling stories about women; they are reconfiguring the very act of looking. Their films centre female subjectivity, silence, routine, ambivalence, pleasure and boredom—the textures of interior life that mainstream Indian cinema has historically sidelined. But they are ready for more. In doing so, they are quietly, but decisively, expanding the possibilities of Indian storytelling.

The most striking evidence of this shift is where Indian cinema has recently made its loudest global noise. Many of the films that have drawn international attention in the past few years have come from women filmmakers. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024) won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Lakshmipriya Devi’s Manipuri-language coming-of-age drama Boong (2024) travelled across festival circuits and became the first Indian film to win a BAFTA this year. Sandhya Suri’s Santosh premiered at Cannes. Rima Das has become a festival regular with films such as Village Rockstars (2017) and Bulbul Can Sing (2018).

It is not just “artistic” indie cinema led by women that are winning hearts. Even in the mainstream Hindi cinema space, films like Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2 (2025) have been attracting attention for reimagining familiar Bollywood terrain.

Add to this Anuparna Roy’s Best Director win at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in 2025 for her debut Songs of Forgotten Trees, and the pattern becomes hard to ignore. Indian women directors are no longer anomalies at Cannes, Sundance, Berlinale or even the mainstream spaces; they are very much contenders.

Yet, the real transformation lies not in winning awards—though recognition and validation always matter—but in the perspective they are bringing in.

There are historical precedents. Ray, in films like Charulata (1964) and Devi (1960), demonstrated extraordinary sensitivity towards women’s inner worlds. Ghosh built an entire career excavating the emotional and psychological lives of women and queer characters. However, these—even now a filmmaker like Jeo Baby with a film like The Great Indian Kitchen (2021)—are exceptions within a system overwhelmingly shaped by male perspectives.

Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light observes the daily rhythms of working women in Mumbai with a patience rarely granted to women characters in Indian cinema. The camera does not consume women’s bodies; it lingers on their gestures, glances and pauses. There is no melodrama, but an accumulation of emotions observed through routine.

Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish (2012) and Dear Zindagi (2016) offered early glimpses of what this shift could look like within mainstream Hindi cinema. Both films explored women’s emotional landscapes with unusual tenderness and spunk. They approached personal transformation not through spectacle, but the slow process of self-recognition.

That sense of empathy has become a defining feature of many contemporary women-directed films. Take Reema Sengupta’s Counterfeit Kunkoo (2017), Nidhi Saxena’s Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman (2024), which travelled to Busan, and Secret of a Mountain Serpent (2025), Subhadra Mahajan’s Second Chance (2024), which premiered at Karlovy Vary, or Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls (2024).

Importantly, these filmmakers are not merely “adding women” to existing narratives. They are rethinking genre cinema itself.

When women direct thrillers, dramas or coming-of-age stories, the emotional architecture often changes. Conflict becomes more psychological, fun, whimsical even, rather than physical. For instance, Farah Khan’s films offer a flamboyant illustration of this within mainstream Bollywood spectacle. Om Shanti Om (2007) and Main Hoon Na (2004) treated genre with irreverent affection, turning action and melodrama into playful, self-aware celebrations of cinema itself. Even the chaotic excess of Tees Maar Khan (2010) carried that same impulse where humour, parody and whimsy often took precedence over the macho seriousness that typically defines male-directed masala blockbusters.

This shift is also visible in documentary filmmaking. Kartiki Gonsalves’s The Elephant Whisperers (2022), produced by Guneet Monga, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 2023. Nocturnes (2024), co-directed by Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta, won a special jury award at Sundance.

The growing visibility of women filmmakers is not accidental. Structural changes—however small—are beginning to reshape the ecosystem. Film labs, festival programmes and development grants have become more conscious of gender disparities. Industry observers note that where programmes once included only one or two women among several participants, female representation is now closer to parity than it has been ever before. Technology has lowered barriers as well. Affordable digital cameras, editing software and online knowledge-sharing have made filmmaking more accessible. The internet has become a vast informal classroom where emerging directors exchange ideas, collaborate and circulate work.

Even so, the transformation remains incomplete.

A recent ‘O Womaniya’ report on the Indian entertainment industry, backed by Ormax Media and Film Companion, and presented by Prime Video, after analysing 122 pieces of entertainment in 2024, found that women continue to be underrepresented behind the camera in theatrical films. While digital platforms show improved representation, mainstream cinema remains heavily male-dominated. The presence of women in executive positions has not automatically translated into more female-driven narratives.

Box office economics also complicate the picture. WOmen-led films still face scepticism regarding their commercial viability. Large-scale theatrical success remains rare, even as these filmmakers gain international acclaim.

And there is another tension women directors must navigate: expectation. Many are pressured—implicitly or explicitly—to produce stories about women empowerment. Yet several filmmakers resist being confined to a thematic category defined by gender. They want the freedom to explore politics, crime, horror, science fiction or mundane urban frustrations without being reduced to representatives of “women’s cinema”.

The emergence of women directors in India is not about replacing one gaze with another. It is about multiplying perspectives. The goal is not a singular “female gaze” but a diverse field of voices, styles and sensibilities. What makes the current moment exciting is the sense that Indian cinema is discovering new ways of seeing.

Cinema, after all, is fundamentally an art of attention. Where the camera rests determines whose experiences matter. For much of its history, Indian cinema looked at women. Increasingly, women are now looking back. And the frame has never felt more brimming with potential.