South Asian FeminismFilms

At a strict Himalayan boarding school, a teenager’s sexual awakening collides with institutional discipline and her mother’s interrupted youth, making desire an intergenerational feminist question.

Zarrar Kahn uses supernatural horror to follow a Karachi mother and daughter after the death of their family patriarch, exposing how grief, property insecurity, and male surveillance make ordinary movement dangerous.

Saim Sadiq’s Lahore family drama follows a married man drawn to a trans dancer, but its feminist force lies in tracing how patriarchal duty frustrates the desires of everyone sharing the household.

Payal Kapadia combines fictional love letters, student protest footage, and archival fragments to connect caste-separated intimacy with the remaking of Indian universities under nationalist power.

A medical professor’s pursuit of accountability after suspected sexual abuse becomes an abrasive study of institutional denial, maternal pressure, and the costs of being believed only when one performs the perfect victim.

This documentary follows the Dalit women journalists of Khabar Lahariya as they move from print to smartphones, turning reporting into a practice of anti-caste feminist authority.

Jeo Baby turns repetitive cooking and cleaning into a rigorous account of how marriage naturalizes women’s unpaid labor, bodily discipline, and religious exclusion.

Rubaiyat Hossain follows a Dhaka garment worker organizing a union, connecting global fashion’s low prices to women’s labor, marital power, and the risks of collective action.

Set amid Sri Lanka’s political violence, this drama follows a widowed mother of eight whose struggle for income reveals how war, sexual exploitation, and social respectability converge on women’s bodies.

Nepal’s pioneering lesbian feature follows a dancer and her lover confronting arranged marriage, family authority, and the scarcity of social space in which queer intimacy can become ordinary life.