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James Mottram

Indian art-house cinema is flourishing, showing a different side to the Indian movie industry best known for its glossy Bollywood films.
“I think it’s been a good year for us,” says Payal Kapadia, director of All We Imagine as Light, with almost disarming modesty.
Twelve months ago, her sensitive, subtle, dreamy film about three women hospital workers in Mumbai became the first Indian drama selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition in 30 years.
It won the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-most prestigious prize after the Palme d’Or.
All We Imagine as Light was not the only Indian film to feature at Cannes in 2024. It was joined by Karan Kandhari’s droll British-funded marital comedy Sister Midnight, which stars Radhika Apte as a new wife in a Mumbai slum who undergoes an unusual transformation.


Beside these two films, Santosh – Sandhya Suri’s British-Indian crime yarn starring Shahana Goswami as a widow who inherits her husband’s job as a police constable in rural India – and The Shameless, a romantic crime tale that won Anasuya Sengupta the best actress prize in the festival’s Un Certain Regard strand, also featured.
It does not stop there. Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age drama Girls Will Be Girls – set in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills – premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival before going on to win the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award, given to productions with budgets less than US$1 million.
The 2025 Berlin International Film Festival featured Shadowbox, co-directed by Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi, which stars Monsoon Wedding’s Tillotama Shome as a housemaid struggling to raise her teen son in Kolkata.
“Indians have been making films for a while,” says Kapadia, whose All We Imagine as Light was made in collaboration with companies from France, India, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
“I think because of the co-production possibilities that are now there, people are able to make more independent films which have an outlook that the West is more open to.”

Shadowbox co-director Sahi agrees, adding that it is not just the possibilities of co-productions that have helped.
“Indian filmmakers are increasingly active in international film markets, submitting more applications to international grants than ever before,” he says.
“The know-how of these global currents is no longer reserved to the few, but is easily accessible information. And filmmakers are making use of it. The growing interest in Southeast Asian cinema, both in terms of festivals and audiences from the West, has certainly helped the tide as well.”
He adds that India has “a robust history of independent cinema”.


This history can be traced back to filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, whose coming-of-age Apu Trilogy, released between 1955 and 1959, remains one of the highlights of world cinema.
But the new films offer more worldly perspectives.
“They’re not Indian films [in the traditional sense],” says Sister Midnight star Apte, who has acted in both Bollywood films (including in 2015’s Badlapur) and international ones (most recently appearing in Justin Lin’s drama Last Days).
“But the stories are based in India, the people are from India. And I think putting that on a global platform, it just changes things. And I think especially because they’re not Indian films. For me that’s most exciting, because it suddenly gives it a very universal appeal.”

Sister Midnight’s director Kandhari calls his film – which takes its title from the Iggy Pop song and features humour that would not be out of place in a movie by American indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch – a “cultural collage”.
“I don’t think of India in that sense when I think of the film, because it’s not like we went there to make a statement about the country,” Kandhari adds.
Intriguingly, what links all of these films, aside from their vivid sense of place, is strong women characters far removed from the alpha males that tend to populate Bollywood blockbusters.
Santosh is a film that “speaks the language of a fiercely feminist empowerment saga”, according to trade paper Variety.
In it, the eponymous protagonist goes through “a very big journey, from being a wife to becoming a widow, and then a policewoman in quite a corrupt force with all the power for good and for bad that’s associated with that,” says director Suri.
“For me, it was very much about seeing how she explores that role and about her trying to search for a way of being a woman,” she adds.


Suri also wanted to see “a female character who would have complex moral decisions to make”, ones that get tougher as the film explores issues of class, caste, religion and gender.
“That was really important to me. I feel like I could watch that much more than I get the opportunity to watch it in cinema,” she says.
The same can be said for All We Imagine as Light: Kapadia was inspired to make her film after seeing women friends coming to Mumbai to work. This led her to explore ideas of feminism and financial independence.
“That doesn’t really happen in our country … because there are all these family ties that don’t allow you to make the choices you want to make so easily,” Kapadia says. “So I was trying to question these feminist ideas that we’ve been told from a Western point of view, which don’t completely apply to our context.”

Shadowbox co-director Das says it is refreshing to see more films with “women we can identify with and root for”: flawed, three-dimensional women like her film’s lead character Maya.
“It is also important to note that many of these women are from the working class,” she says.
“Acknowledging the labour of women, so taken for granted, while also celebrating how they forge their own agency through it, is much needed. Many more stories need to be told to even begin countering the patriarchal and cis[gender] narratives that dominate our culture.”

Perhaps one of the more disappointing aspects is how strict censorship laws have prevented some of these films from screening in India.
Santosh, for example, was denied a release in India when the country’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) objected to its portrayal of police brutality, caste discrimination and misogyny.
“But there is a real appetite” for the film, Suri says. “People are talking about it, and I really do hope, very deeply in my heart, that it will get a chance to be screened. So I’m trying to keep that hope alive.”
Still, the global celebration of Santosh, All We Imagine as Light and other films has been heartening, Sahi says.
This is set to continue. Martin Scorsese has just joined Homebound, a drama about two friends in a small northern Indian village, as an executive producer. The drama will be unveiled at Cannes in May.
“These films have drawn people to cinema halls and home screens, proving that there is a genuine audience out there looking for such cinema,” Sahi says.
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Kani Kusruti (left) and Divya Prabha in a still from All We Imagine as Light.

Kani Kusruti (centre) in a still from All We Imagine as Light. The Indian art-house film, which won the Grand Prix prize at Cannes 2024, is one of many Indian films to feature prominently at recent international film festivals.

Shahana Goswami (centre) in a still from Santosh.

Radhika Apte in a still from Sister Midnight.

Kani Kusruti (left) and Divya Prabha in a still from All We Imagine as Light. Photo: Spirit Media

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Films such as All We Imagine as Light, Sister Midnight and Santosh are showing a different side to Indian cinema and attracting global fans


Films such as All We Imagine as Light, Sister Midnight and Santosh are showing a different side to Indian cinema and attracting global fans.


Move over Bollywood, Indian art-house cinema is on the rise and picking up awards

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Films such as All We Imagine as Light, Sister Midnight and Santosh are showing a different side to Indian cinema and attracting global fans

Films such as All We Imagine as Light, Sister Midnight and Santosh are showing a different side to Indian cinema and attracting global fans