From the outside, India’s indie film world seems impossibly glittery. Last month , Theja Rio’s debut feature Angh, in Nagaland’s tribal Konyak language, won the Platform Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Rio’s tale of an old headman and his son holding on to ancestral faith in the wake of change, is now in competition for an International Feature Film Oscar.
Meanwhile, filmmaker Payal Kapadia, whose 2024 film All We Imagine As Light, about two nurses in Mumbai, won the Grand Prix at Cannes, has more reason to cheer. She is among the 10 winners (the only Indian, the only filmmaker) of the 2026 Chanel Next prize. It’s a cool 100,000 euros to develop new projects.
It’s been a good few years for indie cinema. In 2021, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s documentary Writing with Fire (about Khabar Lahariya, a newspaper run by Dalit women) picked up the Audience Award and a Special Jury Award for Impact for Change at the Sundance Film Festival. It was also the first Indian documentary feature nominated for an Oscar in 2022. That same year, Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes (about three men who run a bird hospital in Delhi) won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and the L’œil d’Or (Golden Eye) at Cannes. It’s also the second Indian documentary feature to be nominated for an Oscar.
The big year: 2024. That’s when Kapadia became the first Indian filmmaker to win the Grand Prix at Cannes; and Anasuya Sengupta won Best Actress in Un Certain Regard for The Shameless, the first Indian actor to win that award. By December, India’s haul included the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance (for Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age drama Girls Will Be Girls) and the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting (for Preeti Panigrahi, in the same film). And last year, Rohan Kanawade’s Marathi film Sabar Bonda won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.
But what’s it like from the inside? A bit of a mixed bag. We asked directors, actors, producers and writers to give us a peek.
Them and us, and everyone else
Making a film — any kind of film — is hard enough. Even big-budget spectacles fail at the box-office, and slow-immersive dramas flounder on streaming networks. To make a film on a small budget, to tell a story that doesn’t conform to popular taste, often in a language most people don’t even understand, is to willingly pile on the risk.
It’s why almost every indie film in India hopes to land at an international festival — and win some kind of award so it can attract the real prize: Being picked up by a distribution studio or streaming network, so the work gets a paying audience, perhaps even turns a tidy profit.
Anuparna Roy’s debut feature film Songs of Forgotten Trees, is about two women renting a home in Mumbai, and won her the Best Director award in the Orizzonti section at the Venice International Film Festival last year. Roy says the win “literally changed everything”, helping her find a producer for her second feature, Lovers in the Blue Night, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this year and won the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film.
Songs of Forgotten Trees has had a four-week release in Italy, Portugal, Belgium and London, but has had no takers in India. It’s how it is with most indie films. A work, “has to first go outside the country and then come back,” for it to be taken seriously.
Beyond the wreaths
Awards don’t always help, says Shaunak Sen. “Documentary sales at Sundance, which is the biggest market in the world, are shrinking.” Even feted films often struggle to find buyers — his own All That Breathes had HBO backing it and an Oscar campaign. Those stars don’t align for every Indian indie on the festival circuit.
So, indie filmmaking is still largely a matter of scrounging. Dimpy Agrawal’s three-year-old company Gubbara Entertainment produced Sen’s first fiction short, Termite, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She quit her job as a bank employee, and worked with commercial production houses such as Phantom Films, Dharma Productions and Netflix before she switched to championing indie films. “It’s really about seeing the correct match for a project and then reaching out to those people to come on board,” she says.
Termite follows two middle-aged men in Delhi, whose close, settled friendship is rocked when one of them receives a marriage proposal. Agarwal knew that the film would need funding from “a foundation that supports human stories”. She found one in the Azim Premji Foundation, which has backed films with socially conscious themes before.
Streaming services are no longer as supportive of indie titles as they were even five years ago, she says. So, producers scrounge for eyeballs as much as they do for funding. Gubbara has taken their films to smaller towns, building audiences directly, with every public screening. Their 2024 short film Chashma, for instance, played at “every festival we got”. But two years in, Agarwal still organises community screenings for it. “It’s a story of a child, so we built our own audience for it. We’ve shown it to over 1,000 schools and colleges.”
The struggle continues
The Manipuri-language film Boong, backed by Farhan Akhtar’s production house, had a limited theatre release this time last year. Lakshmipriya Devi’s story of a young kid from Imphal, who sets out to find his father in the hope of reuniting his family, showed audiences how powerful a simple regional story can be. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Children’s & Family Film in February, which gave the film a second run in cinemas. And it had a limited stream on Mubi.
Suman Sen’s 2021 short film The Silent Echo qualified for Oscar consideration and has won 15 awards across more than 80 festivals, including Best Short of the Festival at Raindance Film Festival and the Asian New Wave Award at Kaohsiung Film Festival in 2022. It also secured an HBO distribution deal and is streaming on Nowness Asia. None of it eased the process of making his first feature film, Eka, which is in post-production. He’s still struggling, after taking Eka to the NFDC Film Bazaar Co-Production Market, film labs and initiatives in France and Italy.
The Silent Echo has had an unusually good run, he says. But “the market dynamics in India for a short film is very bleak. There are not many takers, and not many platforms where one can put them out.” So, filmmakers are stuck in a cycle of constantly travelling or promoting one film, even as they start their next one. It’s expensive, it’s time consuming. It’s stymies the creative process. “Filmmakers also have to run their kitchens. So unfortunately, having privilege has become very, very important for independent filmmakers.” He doesn’t just mean money. “It could be having a great family, friends, a support system.”
All in this together
Support is manifesting in new and unusual ways. Actor Prayrak Mehta, best known for his performance as a migrant in search of his father in Kohrra S2, has championed independent cinema for years. He and his brother, screenwriter and producer Rohan Mehta, have run Versova Homage Screenings (VHS), a monthly community cinema initiative in Mumbai, since 2024. They’ve screened offbeat films such as Avinash Arun’s Killa, Abhinay Deo’s Delhi Belly, and Amit Masurkar’s Sulemani Keeda – largely to industry folks.
Payal Kapadia attended one, right after her Cannes win. “I remember asking her what it’s like there. Is it like Disneyland?” he says, laughing. So, when Mehta found himself at Cannes this year, with Mehar Malhotra’s Punjabi-language short film Shadows of the Moonless Nights, seeing a familiar face there helped. “She was among the people who helped me understand the social and professional ecosystem better.”
Roy, who made Lovers in the Blue Night, about four migrants finding their sense of self in Mumbai, drew on much of the same team that she worked with for her debut, Songs Of Forgotten Trees. That support felt like a constant in the more structured, corporate-backed feature-film-making process. “I have to behave like the boss on sets, and I’m like, how can I? These are my friends,” she says, laughing. “I keep telling producers to give us fewer luxuries and less money, else I’ll ruin it. I want to shoot in the old scrappy manner.”
Standing apart
Around the world, indie filmmakers face the same dilemma: How to stay truly autonomous — independent of market demands, mainstream narratives, safe politics, commercial formulas — and still have the film reach a mass audience. Director-producer Aranya Sahay approaches that dilemma by doing it all himself. His 2024 film, Humans in the Loop, follows an Adivasi woman in Jharkhand who works as a data annotator, training AI systems. It premiered at MAMI in October 2024 and had a limited theatre release in September 2025, and streamed on Netflix the following month.
But getting there was a “bottom-up” process. Sahay partially funded the film himself, and partially through a grant by Storiculture called Museum of Imagined Futures, toured festivals in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kerala, and finally took it to the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. That opened the door to a $50,000 Film Independent Sloan Distribution Grant, which he used for distribution, all to keep his creative freedom.
This experience has shaped how he is approaching Mayapuri, his next feature film. Discussions with larger producers centred around whether he could pursue an international festival run, and whether he could make it “less plot-driven and more experiential”. Sahay says that these conversations led him to realise something: “That I would have to fund the development of the project myself, and then take it to larger partners,” he says. “Honestly, it’s a privilege to be able to do that.”
From HT Brunch, October 3, 2026
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