Kiran Rao on Lost Ladies: ‘We stand on the backs of women who came before us’

Kiran Rao is ready for the Oscars.

Come January, we’ll know if Rao’s second directorial venture, Lost Ladies, India’s official nomination for best international film in 2025, has a chance at winning at the 97th Academy Awards.

Lost Ladies follows Phool and Jaya, two young newlywed brides, who get exchanged during a train ride to their husband’s homes. Rao’s second film after Dhobi Ghat in 2010, Lost Ladies was screened at the 48th Toronto International Film Festival last year in September and released theatrically in March 2024.

Based on a screenplay by Biplab Goswami, the script was brought to Rao by her former husband, the actor and producer Aamir Khan.

Speaking to The Independent, Rao describes the journey the film took, from a script to become India’s official entry to the Oscars.

“The original script by Biplab actually had a lot of the bones of what finally made it to the film,” Rao says.

“And the idea of the swap was, of course, central to how the story played out. And that in itself was very exciting to me because it’s a journey film, and they give you a lot of potential to develop adventures along the way, revelations that the journey can throw up, the growth in the characters as they progress through that journey.”

Rao credits Goswami’s writing as a “great place to start building very interesting characters”, which were built further with writer Sneha Desai.

Rao decided that a comedic, more satirical treatment of the idea that two brides, dressed similarly in bridal finery with their faces covered by their veils, could end up with the wrong husbands would be more fitting.

Because the idea is absurd, and yet oddly plausible, if one looks at the cultural context.

“The idea of the two brides getting swapped because of a confusion with the veil is funny, but it was also a great way to satirise and then address a lot of the themes I wanted to layer into the screenplay,” she said.

“We wanted to build interesting characters, the experiences of women, and really focus on the idea of women’s potentials being perhaps limited by society’s expectations of them.”

Lost Ladies is set in 2001, a fact absolutely integral to the plot not just because it was a time before mobile phones became as common as they are now, but also because the same technology was just starting to find its way into the hands of resourceful young women.

“In more ways than one, we could see what may happen when technology is put in the hands of a woman. And it was also a time when modernity and the conventional, traditional world were also changing quite drastically in India, with technology going into small towns and villages. It was a great time to set the film in as a backdrop for these characters who were going to navigate a journey with very rigid expectations that were set for them to something unexpected,” Rao says.

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Rao makes a pertinent point about lost potential of women and what could happen —her film was selected for the Oscars by the same country whose film certification body denied clearance to a film by a female filmmaker in 2017 for being too “lady oriented”.

This year, Lost Ladies went up against 29 shortlisted films which included two other frontrunners to be India’s entry—Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light and the National Award-winner Aattam.

All three films happen to follow women’s stories, and show how far the country has come.

“Honestly, I’m really honoured to be in the company of people like Payal, Sandhya Suri from the UK, whose film [Santosh] is England’s entry. And I think it’s quite an interesting and exciting moment for women, Indian women in cinema,” Rao says.

“You know, we’ve had Guneet [Monga] and Kartiki [Gonsalves] who won best documentary at the Oscars, and we had Shuchi Talati’s film Girls Will Be Girls at Sundance. We had Anasuya [Sengupta] and Payal winning at Cannes, so I’m hoping that it’s the start of a wave that continues for a very long time.

“We do stand on the backs of a lot of work that was done in the last few decades by women who have been in the film industry, pushing their stories and their perspectives into what is a very strongly male-dominated industry. The fact that there are so many women from India representing storytelling is a great sign for times to come.

“We see women filmmakers now in practically every industry, so we are now seeing a lot more women who are able to bring their stories into a space where perhaps the norm was that the men are the protagonists, they’re the ones saving the day. But I think this has definitely changed across the country, and while I know the change is small because in real terms, we still don’t have parity with men.

“But I think there’s been a clear movement in the last 20 years and we’ve been pushing wherever we are—women filmmakers like Reema [Kagti], Zoya [Akhtar], Alankrita [Shrivastava], Leena [Yadav], Ashwiny [Iyer Tiwari]. So it’s so nice that there’s a space now where it’s not an anomaly and you’re not the minority; we want to be equally represented, at least within the Indian context.”

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As more stories about women are being told, there are also more women watching these stories. While critics and the audience responded largely positively to Lost Ladies, some felt that the film lacked nuance and that its feminist themes seemed too limiting, too simplistic.

On such criticism, Rao chooses to look at the silver lining. “When we made this film, we really wanted to address certain struggles that women face pretty broadly. And I think if one tries to put the film to every single test, then perhaps we didn’t address caste or every issue that women go through either,” she says.

“But I think the idea was to also look at a spectrum of women from mothers, grandmothers, sisters-in-law, from characters like Manju Maai to the two young girls, to look at the experiences that women have in a certain sort of rural environment, but also in many ways, issues that are faced in very, very urban spaces as well. So I feel that we achieved what we set out to achieve in terms of what we wanted to talk about.

“And I’m glad that it opens the space for discussion about perhaps all the other things that could have been there, or maybe the things that we addressed that people have different perspectives on. So I’m always open to that discussion.”

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There are high hopes pinned on Rao’s film. Despite the record-breaking numbers of films India releases in a year, only three Indian films have earned a nomination at the Oscars. None have won.

The last Indian film to be nominated in the best international feature category was the 2001 period film Lagaan, starring Aamir Khan as the lead.

One might safely assume that with this being Khan’s second time with an Oscars campaign, Lost Ladies is in safe hands.

“Things are both the same and different since Lagaan had been sent as India’s entry. There are, of course, a lot more countries, and it takes a lot of money, power, perception building, holding screenings for people all over the world, to simply get people to register that this film is in the running,” Rao says.

“I think for us, the job is to just get people to watch the film, because that’s the best way, or rather, the only way to make it—if you get the voters in your category to watch the film.

On her chances at the Oscars, Rao stays optimistic. “I feel like while there are much, much bigger Goliaths out there, I’m hoping Lost Ladies will be a little David.”

Lost Ladies is available for streaming on Netflix.