For years, conversations around women in Indian cinema were mostly about who was visible on screen. In 2026, that conversation feels incomplete. Some of the most exciting change is now happening behind the camera — in the script room, at the edit table, and in the director’s chair. At a time when a 2026 Tulsea-Ormax report flagged persistent pay, credit and delay gaps for Indian screenwriters, women creators are still pushing through and changing the texture of storytelling itself.
Payal Kapadia and the Rise of Intimate, Global Indian Cinema
Payal Kapadia has become one of the defining names of this moment. All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024, and Cannes itself notes that the film brought India back into the main Competition after a 30-year gap. TIME later called Kapadia a “trailblazer,” praising the film’s emotional, philosophical and meditative quality. What makes her impact so important is not just the award, but the gaze: quiet, political, humane and deeply attentive to women’s inner lives. She is proving that Indian stories do not have to shout to travel the world.
Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti: Building a Storytelling Ecosystem
If Kapadia represents the power of personal cinema, Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti represent long-term cultural influence. Tiger Baby’s official profile describes Zoya as a writer-director-producer whose body of work breaks conventional norms, and the company has steadily expanded beyond films into newer storytelling spaces. Reema’s Superboys of Malegaon, meanwhile, was showcased at TIFF as the story of a self-made filmmaker building no-budget cinema with his community. Together, Zoya and Reema have done more than make successful projects — they have helped create an ecosystem where offbeat voices, local worlds and unconventional characters are treated as commercially and creatively viable.
Sudha Kongara: Giving Mainstream Cinema More Muscle
Sudha Kongara’s contribution lies in how she treats mainstream cinema with seriousness. Her recent Tamil film Parasakthi arrived with political charge and scale, and reports around the film underlined both its ambitious canvas and the debates it generated. Kongara’s strength is that she does not separate emotion from ideology or scale from substance. In a film culture that often expects spectacle to flatten complexity, she keeps proving that mass cinema can still have conviction, urgency and social weight.
Arati Kadav: Changing the Language of Women-Centred Films
Arati Kadav is another filmmaker expanding the grammar of Indian storytelling. In interviews around Mrs, she explained that she approached the adaptation not as a blunt sermon but as a coming-of-age story, resisting the temptation to turn every man into a cartoon villain. That matters. It shows a filmmaker interested in systems, silences and emotional detail rather than easy binaries. Kadav had already carved a distinct space through speculative and sci-fi storytelling; with Mrs, she brought that same thoughtfulness to domestic realism.
Kanika Dhillon: Writing Women Who Refuse Simplicity
Among screenwriters, Kanika Dhillon remains one of the sharpest names to watch. Netflix’s official material for Do Patti described the film as one that blurs the line between law and justice, with complex characters at its centre. That is exactly where Dhillon’s writing has found strength — in morally messy women, emotional volatility and narratives that do not ask female characters to stay neat, noble or easily readable. In an industry that long preferred women on paper to be either victims or ideals, writers like Dhillon are making them stranger, tougher and far more alive.
The Real Shift Is in Authorship
What connects these women is not a single genre or style. It is authorship. They are changing who gets to frame desire, conflict, memory, ambition and rage in Indian cinema. And that may be the biggest shift of all: women are no longer just asking for better stories. They are writing, directing and shaping them on their own terms.
By – Juhi