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Kiran Rao is prepared for the Oscars.
Come January, we’ll know if Rao’s second directorial enterprise, Misplaced Girls, India’s official nomination for finest worldwide movie in 2025, has an opportunity at successful on the 97th Academy Awards.
Misplaced Girls follows Phool and Jaya, two younger newlywed brides, who get exchanged throughout a prepare journey to their husband’s houses. Rao’s second movie after Dhobi Ghat in 2010, Misplaced Girls was screened on the forty eighth Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant final yr in September and launched theatrically in March 2024.
Based mostly on a screenplay by Biplab Goswami, the script was delivered to Rao by her former husband, the actor and producer Aamir Khan.
Chatting with The Unbiased, Rao describes the journey the movie took, from a script to develop into India’s official entry to the Oscars.
“The unique script by Biplab truly had a number of the bones of what lastly made it to the movie,” Rao says.
“And the concept of the swap was, in fact, central to how the story performed out. And that in itself was very thrilling to me as a result of it’s a journey movie, they usually provide you with a number of potential to develop adventures alongside the way in which, revelations that the journey can throw up, the expansion within the characters as they progress by way of that journey.”
Rao credit Goswami’s writing as a “excellent place to begin constructing very attention-grabbing characters”, which have been constructed additional with author Sneha Desai.
Rao determined {that a} comedic, extra satirical therapy of the concept two brides, dressed equally in bridal finery with their faces coated by their veils, may find yourself with the mistaken husbands can be extra becoming.
As a result of the concept is absurd, and but oddly believable, if one seems on the cultural context.
“The concept of the 2 brides getting swapped due to a confusion with the veil is humorous, however it was additionally a good way to satirise after which tackle a number of the themes I needed to layer into the screenplay,” she mentioned.
“We needed to construct attention-grabbing characters, the experiences of girls, and actually deal with the concept of girls’s potentials being maybe restricted by society’s expectations of them.”
Misplaced Girls is about in 2001, a reality completely integral to the plot not simply because it was a time earlier than cell phones turned as widespread as they’re now, but in addition as a result of the identical know-how was simply beginning to discover its means into the arms of resourceful younger ladies.
“In additional methods than one, we may see what could occur when know-how is put within the arms of a lady. And it was additionally a time when modernity and the traditional, conventional world have been additionally altering fairly drastically in India, with know-how going into small cities and villages. It was a good time to set the movie in as a backdrop for these characters who have been going to navigate a journey with very inflexible expectations that have been set for them to one thing surprising,” Rao says.
Rao makes a pertinent level about misplaced potential of girls and what may occur —her movie was chosen for the Oscars by the identical nation whose movie certification physique denied clearance to a movie by a feminine filmmaker in 2017 for being too “woman oriented”.
This yr, Misplaced Girls went up towards 29 shortlisted movies which included two different frontrunners to be India’s entry—Payal Kapadia’s All We Think about as Gentle and the Nationwide Award-winner Aattam.
All three movies occur to comply with ladies’s tales, and present how far the nation has come.
“Truthfully, I’m actually honoured to be within the firm of individuals like Payal, Sandhya Suri from the UK, whose movie [Santosh] is England’s entry. And I believe it’s fairly an attention-grabbing and thrilling second for girls, Indian ladies in cinema,” Rao says.
“You realize, we’ve had Guneet [Monga] and Kartiki [Gonsalves] who gained finest documentary on the Oscars, and we had Shuchi Talati’s movie Women Will Be Women at Sundance. We had Anasuya [Sengupta] and Payal successful at Cannes, so I’m hoping that it’s the beginning of a wave that continues for a really very long time.
“We do stand on the backs of a number of work that was finished in the previous few many years by ladies who’ve been within the movie trade, pushing their tales and their views into what’s a really strongly male-dominated trade. The truth that there are such a lot of ladies from India representing storytelling is a good signal for occasions to come back.
“We see ladies filmmakers now in virtually each trade, so we at the moment are seeing much more ladies who’re in a position to deliver their tales into an area the place maybe the norm was that the lads are the protagonists, they’re those saving the day. However I believe this has positively modified throughout the nation, and whereas I do know the change is small as a result of in actual phrases, we nonetheless don’t have parity with males.
“However I believe there’s been a transparent motion within the final 20 years and we’ve been pushing wherever we’re—ladies filmmakers like Reema [Kagti], Zoya [Akhtar], Alankrita [Shrivastava], Leena [Yadav], Ashwiny [Iyer Tiwari]. So it’s so good that there’s an area now the place it’s not an anomaly and also you’re not the minority; we need to be equally represented, no less than inside the Indian context.”
As extra tales about ladies are being informed, there are additionally extra ladies watching these tales. Whereas critics and the viewers responded largely positively to Misplaced Girls, some felt that the movie lacked nuance and that its feminist themes appeared too limiting, too simplistic.
On such criticism, Rao chooses to have a look at the silver lining. “After we made this movie, we actually needed to deal with sure struggles that ladies face fairly broadly. And I believe if one tries to place the movie to each single check, then maybe we didn’t tackle caste or each difficulty that ladies undergo both,” she says.
“However I believe the concept was to additionally have a look at a spectrum of girls from moms, grandmothers, sisters-in-law, from characters like Manju Maai to the 2 younger ladies, to have a look at the experiences that ladies have in a sure kind of rural surroundings, but in addition in some ways, points which might be confronted in very, very city areas as nicely. So I really feel that we achieved what we got down to obtain when it comes to what we needed to speak about.
“And I’m glad that it opens the house for dialogue about maybe all the opposite issues that would have been there, or perhaps the issues that we addressed that folks have totally different views on. So I’m at all times open to that dialogue.”
There are excessive hopes pinned on Rao’s movie. Regardless of the record-breaking numbers of movies India releases in a yr, solely three Indian movies have earned a nomination on the Oscars. None have gained.
The final Indian movie to be nominated in the very best worldwide function class was the 2001 interval movie Lagaan, starring Aamir Khan because the lead.
One would possibly safely assume that with this being Khan’s second time with an Oscars marketing campaign, Misplaced Girls is in secure arms.
“Issues are each the identical and totally different since Lagaan had been despatched as India’s entry. There are, in fact, much more nations, and it takes some huge cash, energy, notion constructing, holding screenings for folks all around the world, to easily get folks to register that this movie is within the working,” Rao says.
“I believe for us, the job is to simply get folks to observe the movie, as a result of that’s one of the best ways, or reasonably, the one method to make it—in the event you get the voters in your class to observe the movie.
On her probabilities on the Oscars, Rao stays optimistic. “I really feel like whereas there are a lot, a lot larger Goliaths on the market, I’m hoping Misplaced Girls will probably be just a little David.”
Misplaced Girls is on the market for streaming on Netflix.
