Why she makes films
People often come to Nandita Das with their own causes. Can you make a film on addiction? On disability? One request that surprised her immensely was for a film about a man who fell off a coconut tree and died.
Das has directed films that are thought-provoking, with themes such as identity and displacement (Manto), communal violence (Firaaq), and the dignity of the working class (Zwigato).
Nandita Das has acted in more than 40 films, in 10 different languages. Deepa Mehta’s 1996 film Fire, in which Das gave a critically acclaimed performance, sparked outrage in parts of India over the open depiction of homosexuality. She has won 16 acting awards to date, and has directed three films. Her book Manto and I (Aleph Book Company, 2020) is an account of the six years she spent making her second film, Manto, about celebrated Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto.
Now working on her fourth film, her “most personal yet,” Das is raising the funds for this one herself, “having been burned by three studios in the past.”
Nandita Das spoke with India Currents at SALA 2026 about the rightward shift in democracies, the invisible workers of the gig economy, her upcoming film about marriage, and choosing her patrons.
Film Talk on Campuses
Raji Pillai: You came to Stanford University in 2019 and gave a wonderful talk about the making of Manto. Since then, you’ve spent most of your time in India, but have also had a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, and have visited other universities. How has that experience been?
Nandita Das: I’ve taken my films across various universities. I did it with “Manto”: I took it to Brown, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cornell, Columbia. And I did that with “Zwigato” too, which is about the gig economy. At MIT, [Nobel laureate in Economics] Abhijit Banerjee had a conversation with me, as well as another professor at Columbia University.
I like going to campuses especially. It’s interesting for students and the academic world to engage, and for me it’s interesting too. They ask different questions.
The kind of films I make are very locally rooted in the milieu the film is set in, where I come from. But they are also universal stories, because they deal with universal themes and emotions. The wider you can take it, the happier one is as a filmmaker.
A Steady Shift to the Right
RP: What Manto experienced- the oppression by governments, his struggles, the lawsuits- could apply to a lot that is going on today. What are your impressions of what’s going on in the world, in the U.S. as well as India?
ND: Everywhere there is, unfortunately, a steady shift to the right, and it’s of deep concern to all of us who took democracy for granted. We assumed that everybody would want equality, that nobody would be for discrimination. Through art and literature and conversations, you want to lessen prejudice and invoke more empathy for the other, not create the other.
World over, there is so much angst, because there is unemployment, there is fragility of life, there are uncertainties. So the ground is ready for anyone to play identity politics. It’s easier to say, be proud of this, whether it’s race, religion, or caste, and make it so polarized. These shifts have always happened when people are more vulnerable, when they don’t have a voice. When they feel so disempowered, hanging on to an identity gives them some sense of self. But it’s a false sense of self. That’s not how we need to define ourselves. It’s exclusionary.
Hidden in Plain Sight
RP: During visits to India, I notice food delivery riders everywhere, in residential buildings, at restaurants, on the streets. Share your perspective on the gig economy, about which you made your most recent film, “Zwigato.”
ND: During the COVID shutdown, the gig economy saved us. Everything is at your fingertips. Food delivery riders, Blinkit, Zepto. In under 10 minutes, you will get whatever you want. And we don’t realize the exploitation there is, or how people literally risk their lives. If you’re going to get something in under 10 minutes, that person is going through red lights, driving the wrong way. It’s dangerous. And it’s like being a daily wager: today you might get five deliveries, tomorrow none. The uncertainty leads to a lot of anxiety in that world.
Zwigato tells the story of one delivery rider’s family. The film is trying to show that our lives are becoming more convenient. We are becoming more comfortable sitting in our homes and just ordering. What happens to those who are making our lives comfortable? They are hidden in plain sight, because you see them, but you don’t really see them. People are more and more invisible.
RP: Even here in the U.S., people work three gig economy jobs. They drive for Uber, for Lyft, for something else. Their family lives, say, four hours away, and they live elsewhere to make a living, sleeping in their cars. How did people react to your film?
ND: The film triggered a lot of interesting conversations. People who watched it told me, “Now we give them much better ratings.” I just wonder: is it even worth rating? If there is a little bit of leakage, you would reduce the rating. But once you know that it matters so much to them, and it actually matters so little to you, you see things differently. You could just be nice to them. If somebody has come in 40-degree heat, at least offer them a glass of water. Simple acts of kindness. It doesn’t take anything, just to be human.
I try to always make films about the more marginalized, all the conversations that we are not having, or the themes and issues that I’m disturbed by or I’m concerned with, whether it was Firaaq, Manto, or Zwigato.
Manto and I
RP: Tell us about your upcoming film.
ND: My next film is about marriage. It’s the most intimate, personal, smaller film. And this time I’m not going to any corporate house for funding. I’ve done all three films with a standard film studio. They let you make the film, but I’ve never really been satisfied with the way they market, distribute, and position it. These films have a far greater reach than we think, but often they’re just not available to the audience that might be interested. So this one, I’m not self-financing, but I’m raising the funds myself. So if there are people who would like to contribute, whether as investors or by giving grants, I would be most delighted.
I’m hoping that through this attendance at SALA, I will find people who believe in that vision, who want to support independent stories. Marriage, or a relationship, is something everyone is going through, wherever they may be. Especially in India, we have one foot in tradition and one in modernity. How do we navigate relationships without vilifying anybody, or even the institution of marriage? How do we understand the subtler inequalities that exist between equals?
RP: Is it a fictional depiction?
ND: There’s a lot of my life. I’ve been married, separated, have a child. But it’s not an autobiography. Apart from my life, there are many other lives I’ve witnessed, been privy to, read or heard about, so it’s become a composite of characters. It’s literally a two-actor film. I’m excited to tell this story because I’ve shared the script shamelessly with a lot of people, and I’m truly encouraged by the response. People across countries, genders, ages, and different kinds of relationships have connected with it, because the fundamental issues remain the same.
RP: The two-person format of your film reminds me of the epistolary play Tumhari Amrita, Javed Siddiqui’s adaptation of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. The story told through letters is so captivating.
ND: Yes, the actors are just sitting and reading, and yet, somewhere we are all voyeurs, in the sense that you want to get into other people’s lives, be a fly on the wall and see how they deal with it. And it’s a mirror to our lives too.
Patrons and the Moral Compass
RP: Money tends to either change people or reveal that they never had any integrity in the first place. So when you look for money, as all artists do, where do you align your moral compass? Do you look into who these people are, and whether you wish to be supported by them?
ND: We need patrons. We can’t do without them. I look at whether I feel comfortable: how they talk, what their engagements are, what they are concerned about. It may have nothing to do with the film or its subject. But what’s their worldview? What do they care about as human beings? Who are they? Why are they supporting it? Is it for the right reasons? Is it just to walk the red carpet, to get an executive producer credit? I’m not saying those are not good reasons. But is it fundamentally because they care about the story, or want to support independent voices, or have followed my work and feel connected to it, moved by it, or want to be an ally to these kinds of stories?
And I’ve been very fortunate. The three or four backers I have are really incredible people. A lot of couples have come on, which is really nice. It’s not just the men controlling the money. Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author, has also put in some money, so he is one of the investors. [Mukherjee won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for “The Emperor of All Maladies.”] Mainly, they are people who trust your voice and care about it.
