After completing the Cannes Next Steps development program in Paris, award-winning Indian filmmaker Sonejuhl Sinha presents her latest work—a powerful exploration of motherhood, poverty, and the fight for personal agency in rural India. Here, the director—whose Stray Dolls feature won the Tribeca IWC award—explains the choices she made in creating this intensely emotional drama: 

“I wanted the film to have a mythical, almost fairytale like feeling as if the story could have existed centuries ago as well as today. I created a hyper real feeling from locations, performances, and sound, combining them to take us into an unusual world that impacts us emotionally and viscerally. 

“We worked hard to find locations that evoked a magical quality. It was important to open on the desert, where women and the wind wailed together. It was important for me to portray the characters not simply as victims but as multi-dimensional human brings who fight for agency on a daily basis. It’s just that there are some battles they win and some they lose.”