Anupama Chopra sits down for InFocus with the team behind Shape of Momo, the quietly devastating debut from Sikkimese filmmaker Tribeny Rai that she calls the Avengers of indie film distribution: actor-producer Rana Daggubati of Spirit Media, and Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti of Tiger Baby. Shot entirely in Nepali in Rai’s own East Sikkim village, the film follows Bishnu, a prickly, difficult woman who quits her Delhi job and returns home, only to find she can no longer fit. Rai explains why she refused to make her protagonist likable or to fall back on the righteous-feminist template, how she wanted to show that patriarchy keeps functioning even without a patriarch in the room, and why Gyan, Bishnu’s gentle, eminently suitable love interest, is written as a good man rather than a villain. She and cinematographer Archana Ghangrekar also made a deliberate choice not to romanticise Sikkim’s beauty, keeping the lens on the people and the lived-in textures of a house full of three generations of women.
The conversation widens into the state of Indian independent cinema and how it actually reaches an audience. Rana traces Spirit Media’s theatrical-first mission to build an ecosystem for alternative films, work that began in Telugu and runs through All We Imagine as Light and Sabar Bonda, and describes the hyperlocal study of where a subtitle audience really lives. Reema and Zoya talk about Tiger Baby’s deliberately plan-free instinct to back whatever moves them, whether that is Gully Boy or the documentary Turtle Walker or Shape of Momo, and how openly accessible they remain to new filmmakers. With the Independent Filmmakers Association of India newly launched at Cannes, and recent wins from Sabar Bonda at Sundance, Songs of Forgotten Trees at Venice, Boong at the BAFTAs and Homebound on the Oscar trail, the group debates whether the ground has genuinely shifted. They close on what success means for a film like this: not box-office numbers but the slow building of a habit, cinema that ages and deepens with time, and audiences choosing patronage of art over algorithm-fed hate-watching.
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