Across Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Busan, Toronto, and India’s own IFFI, women are no longer a token presence but a defining force: winning grand prizes, rewriting programming ratios, and setting the terms of global cinematic conversation
For decades, women made landmark films from the margins. Today, they are writing the marquee. In the space of a few seasons, festival line-ups, major prizes, and even the Oscars scoreboard have shifted in ways that feel structural, not symbolic. Indian filmmakers are right in the thick of this turn, winning grand prizes, anchoring juries, and setting programming benchmarks at home. The result is not just better representation; it is a deeper recalibration of what stories global cinema deems central.
Consider the springboard moment: in May 2024, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light became the first Indian film ever to win Cannes’ Grand Prix and the first Indian film in 30 years to compete for the Palme. In 2025, she returned to Cannes as a main-competition juror, proof that the system now sees her not as an outlier but as an authority. The halo effects were immediate: theatrical runs, major critics’ lists, and awards-season momentum that travelled well beyond the Croisette.
The ripple stretched across the festival map. At the 2024 Berlinale, the Golden Bear went to Mati Diop’s Dahomey, consolidating a two-year pattern of documentaries and of women, owning the top prize. That outcome, coupled with the festival’s broader authorial mix, signalled that “female gaze” is no longer a sidebar; it’s a core cinematic grammar.
Venice, long a bellwether for awards season, has also edged toward breadth. In 2024, women accounted for a meaningful slice of the main competition; by 2025, the festival’s awards slate again featured high-profile wins by women, and critically for India; a breakthrough in the Orizzonti (Horizons) competition: Bengal-born Anuparna Roy won Best Director for her debut Songs of Forgotten Trees, the first Indian filmmaker to take that prize in the section. It’s a milestone that sits comfortably alongside the Kapadia moment, evidence that Indian women are no longer exceptions but a cohort.
Busan, Asia’s most influential launchpad, formalised this direction in 2024 by introducing the Camellia Award to “raise the status of women in the film industry.” In the same edition, Rima Das’s Village Rockstars 2 won the Kim Jiseok Award, one of BIFF’s signature honours, before moving on to the Berlinale programme in 2025. It’s a neat illustration of pipeline power: an Asian premiere, a women-focused institutional signal, and then a European A-list platform.
The quickening isn’t only about red carpets; it’s showing up in programming ratios. India’s own IFFI (Goa) put nine films by women into its 15-title international competition in 2024, an extraordinary 60 per cent share that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. This wasn’t a token corner; it was the centre of the flagship competition.
Awards season is catching up as well. At the 97th Academy Awards (2025), Coralie Fargeat’s nomination for Best Director (The Substance) pushed the all-time list of women nominees in that category to 10, a club that, outside the hot-takes, quietly keeps expanding post-Bigelow, Zhao, and Campion. That numeric baseline matters: once a pattern is visible, financing norms and greenlight maths follow.
Zoom back to India and you see a layered bench, not a single star. Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies has moved through a year-long festival-to-popular-awards arc, winning critical and mainstream recognition even as it missed an Oscar slot, important because it proves a female-directed social comedy can build an audience without riding controversy. Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls took the Sundance World Cinema Audience Award and kept travelling, a textbook case of discovery-to-distribution momentum for a woman-led, India-rooted indie.
The momentum has been equally visible in Toronto. At TIFF 2024, Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, a debut feature from Manipur in the Discovery section, signalled how even the most regionally rooted Indian stories by first-time women directors are now finding global premieres at one of the world’s most influential festivals. Building on that, TIFF 2025 is set to host India’s first formally women-led delegation, coordinated by Women in Film India, a striking signal of institutional support that goes beyond individual breakthroughs. Panels like New HERizons: Asian Women Shaping Film, featuring filmmakers such as Taiwan’s Tsou Shih-ching and Japan’s Chie Hayakawa, underscore how the conversation on women’s authorship is now central to TIFF’s programming vocabulary.
The Toronto-Busan circuit is also tightening its embrace of South Asian voices; alongside women-directed works, films like Bayaan in TIFF’s Discovery section are crossing over into Busan’s A Window on Asian Cinema, creating a festival ecosystem where Indian women filmmakers are consistently part of the conversation. These additions matter because they mark a systemic change: it is no longer rare for an Indian woman director to premiere in Toronto, win at Busan, or sit on the Cannes jury. It is expected. The fact that such breakthroughs are now accompanied by structural initiatives, delegations, panels, awards created explicitly to raise women’s visibility, suggests the cinema landscape is not simply accommodating women directors, but actively centring them as the future.
These developments together signal a structural realignment in cinema. The very definition of what counts as “international” is expanding, as Kapadia’s Cannes triumph and Rima Das’s Busan win prove that stories rooted in Mumbai’s working class or Assam’s villages can travel alongside West African restitution narratives. Festivals are also shifting from mere representation to repertoires; IFFI’s decision to place 60 percent of its international competition films in women’s hands wasn’t a token gesture but a recalibration of the competitive field, shaping the ambitions of a new generation. The Oscars are reinforcing this trend: each nomination of a woman director chips away at the notion of exception, influencing financiers and distributors who look to Los Angeles for cues.
At the same time, Asia is creating its own scaffolding for women filmmakers. Busan’s Camellia Award and similar initiatives convert recognition into mentorships, visibility, and eventually, funding, setting precedents for the region. The audience's appetite is proving just as decisive, All We Imagine as Light didn’t just collect prizes, it sold tickets and crossed into mainstream lists, validating the market for auteurist, women-centred cinema. Most significantly, India’s female gaze is no longer a novelty but a market segment in itself. From Kiran Rao’s socially attuned comedy to Shuchi Talati’s teenage-angle drama to Rima Das’s rural continuum, the tonal range is widening, and as these films travel from Sundance to MAMI to Busan, Berlin, and streaming platforms, they carve grooves that the next slate of women filmmakers can confidently reuse.
Crucially, this rise has also shifted who holds institutional voice. Women directors are not only winning prizes; they’re sitting on juries and shaping selections. Kapadia’s 2025 Cannes jury role is emblematic; it ensures that evaluative vocabularies themselves broaden, a subtle but powerful flywheel for future choices.
What changes next? Three pressures will define the curve—first, distribution. As Kapadia herself has noted, independent cinema in India still contends with scarce screens and inconsistent state support. Policy tweaks, public funds for subtitling, targeted screen subsidies for festival winners, and co-production facilitation can turn fragile wins into a pipeline. Second, mid-budget financing. With awards data shifting, banks and streamers can underwrite women-led projects at the `10-30 crore band without insisting on formulaic casting. Third, craft ecosystems. The rise of women in direction is mirrored by gains in cinematography, editing, and production design; keeping that momentum means training, not just trophies. If the last two years were the “proof,” the next two should be about “scale.” On the global stage, women are not just present; they are centring the frame — artistically, institutionally, and commercially. And in that frame, India is no longer waiting at the edge of the picture. It’s in focus.
The writer is a former civil servant and writes on cinema and strategic communication. Inputs by Zoya Ahmad and Vaishnavie Srinivasan