Opinion Cruel reality for filmmakers in India: It’s difficult to survive outside Bollywood and regional movie industries
It’s not that we lack talent. But in the absence of a supporting ecosystem, their creations rarely make it beyond the festival circuit
Only those with sufficient privilege and access to international networks can survive as independent filmmakers. 
In the just-concluded 56th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, delegates were sprinting across venues, juggling time slots and refreshing the booking app with the confidence of people who know exactly how this festival works. All this to secure seats for the latest films by Jafar Panahi, Park Chan-wook, Jim Jarmusch and other filmmakers. Honestly, what is IFFI without some mild anxiety about getting tickets to the feature films that have already made plenty of noise on the festival circuit?
What is particularly exciting about these films is how confidently they hold on to the filmmaker’s original vision. They are shaped from within, not pushed around by commercial expectations, star value, market ambitions or crowd-pleasing pressures. Cinema may always be a balance between art and business. But whenever you sit inside an international festival theatre, it becomes very clear what films can look like when the artistic impulse is allowed to take the lead.
This, unfortunately, brings us back to a question we keep circling back to every year. Why does a country like India, with such a vast and thriving film industry across Bollywood and regional cinema, still have such a lukewarm impact at international festivals?
It is not as if we lack talent. In recent years, PS Vinothraj’s Pebbles (2021) won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light (2024) won the Grand Prix at Cannes. And Anupama Roy’s Songs Of Forgotten Trees (2025) won her the Best Director in the Orizzonti section at Venice. It all sounds great on paper. But the arrival of such filmmakers remains occasional, and even after their initial success, the ecosystem does not necessarily support them.
The pattern is quite hard to miss. Only those with sufficient privilege and access to international networks can survive as independent filmmakers. Kapadia is a good example. Long before her Grand Prix win in 2024, she had already shown her short film at Cannes in 2017 and had won the Golden Eye Award in 2021. After the 2024 win, she returned to the festival as a jury member in 2025. Such an ecosystem that allows a filmmaker to keep growing and strengthening their independent voice is rare. And not every filmmaker can even afford to make films aimed at the Cannes Film Festival in the first place.
Contrast this with PS Vinothraj’s experience. Even after Pebbles had won the Tiger Award, producers struggled to secure a release in theatres, and the film eventually went straight to OTT. His next movie, Kottukkaali (2024), was selected for the Forum section at the Berlin International Film Festival. This time, he had recognisable Tamil and Malayalam stars, which helped the film finally reach theatres. But once it entered the local market, the film ran into resistance from both the Tamil film industry and the audience. It was quickly labelled “experimental” and “offbeat”, and many argued that a theatrical release was a mistake. Viewers were reportedly unhappy with the slow pace and the open ending and expressed their disappointment.
In hindsight, it seems Pebbles may have avoided this backlash because it never had a theatrical release. It remained a “festival film”, watched by a distant audience that did not demand that it behave like a Tamil mainstream product.
Vinothraj was visibly upset at the reaction to Kottukkaali. Its male star, Soori, quietly distanced himself from the film because he did not want the criticism to affect the market value of his future projects. And without the sort of international support that someone like Kapadia has managed to build, Vinothraj now finds himself pushed to make a film that will satisfy the Tamil market simply to survive.
This is the cannibalistic nature of Bollywood and the regional industries. No talent is allowed to survive meaningfully outside them. The only way to do it is the Payal Kapadia route, where one slowly builds a creative and professional world far from the Indian mainstream. But filmmakers like Vinothraj, who are forced to rely on local support, are swallowed too quickly by the commercial system.
Which brings us back to the larger problem. India produces an enormous number of films every year, yet we still lack a strong and dependable independent ecosystem. Until filmmakers are allowed the breathing space to grow without immediately being crushed by commercial expectations, our presence at international festivals will continue to be accidental, inconsistent and unfairly fragile.
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