Girls Will Be Girls, All We Imagine as Light: How feminism, not Bollywood, drew global audiences to Indian cinema in 2024

This fortunate alignment has been a cinematic dream. The global impact of these films is rooted in their quality and exploration of universal themes like loneliness, relationships, identity, gender and resilience. With strong female voices and unconventional feminist narratives, these stories venture into territories unexplored by mainstream Indian cinema.

In All We Imagine As Light, a film made in the Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam languages, three migrant women in Mumbai navigate empathy, resilience and human connection. The narrative delves into themes of loneliness and the socio-political landscape, notably the scrutiny of interfaith Hindu-Muslim relationships as seen with the character Anu (Divya Prabha) and her bond with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon).

Kapadia told the BBC that while the women in her films are financially independent, they still face limitations in their personal lives, particularly when it comes to matters of love.

“For me, love in India is very political… women seem to hold a lot of the so-called honour of the family and the protection of the caste lineage. So if she marries somebody who is of a different religion or of a different caste, that becomes an issue. For me, it is really a method to control women and infantilise them,” she says.

Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls explores female adolescence, rebellion and intergenerational conflict through the story of a 16-year-old girl studying at a strict boarding school in the Himalayas and her fractured relationship with her mother, Anila, who struggles with her own vulnerabilities and unresolved emotions.

“It is the kind of coming-of-age film that we don’t do in India at all,” Gupta says. “It looks at women from a very empathetic, very warm gaze.”

“The age where people experience emotions with and without their bodies, their minds, that exploration but without infantilising the experience – it was never part of Indian mainstream cinema,” she adds.