Films by directors such as Payal Kapadia and Shuchi Talati have not only grabbed awards at film festivals like Cannes and Sundance, but also stood out for their nuanced portrayal of women's desires, loneliness, and more
Like many women in this country, the years that filmmaker Shuchi Talati spent in school were shaped by heavy policing: not just of romantic expressions and desires, but also the length of her skirts, and conversations with teenage boys. Movies, barring some exceptions, too featured coy women, dancing around trees or in snowy mountains, clad in chiffon sarees, miraculously surviving the cold. “We all grew up with shame around sexuality and then this was reinforced on our screens. If you think about the films from the 90s, women often only became marriageable when they put on a salwar kameez,” Talati says.
Shuchi Talati's debut feature, Girls Will Be Girls, a tender coming-of-age drama set in an Indian boarding school bagged an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.