The Slow Rise, Steady Reach Of Indie Films in India: 'Sabar Bonda' To 'Humans In The Loop' and 'Bad Girl'

September is an unusual month for Indian cinema with independent movies, having won awards and accolades at film festivals, suddenly vying for spaces in theatres — Aranya Sahay’s Humans in the Loop and Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl having released on 5 September, Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma having been unveiled on 12 September, and Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sundance-winning Sabar Bonda and Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong debuting on 19 September.

To be sure, these are limited releases — a few theatres in predominantly tier 1 cities — that might expand if such a demand is made by the audience. Also, to be sure, these are in line with the 30 September release deadline for films to be considered eligible by the Film Federation of India (FFI) for India’s entry to the Academy Awards.

This marks September’s theatrical calendar as an exception. But the fact that a greater number of independent movies are able to cobble up the capital — both social and financial — to get a release slot, shows a shift in the market. Besides, even without the FFI deadline looming, this year alone we had Jayant Digambar Somalkar’s Sthal, Subhadra Mahajan’s Second Chance, Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight, and Dibakar Das Roy’s Dilli Dark release in theatres. Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, UK’s entry for the Academy Awards last year, too, while expected, was, ultimately blocked by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

Money Matters

It is true that many of these films do not have the same pressures of releasing a commercial film theatrically. Some might have ‘soft funds’— grants — invested in them. For example, the budget for the Cannes Grand Prix-winner All We Imagine as Light, an Indo-French-Dutch-Italian-Luxembourg co-production, was put together through funds from the Huub Bals and Cinéfondation, among others. As a result, these films do not have the anxious urgency or the seeding expectation to recover the film’s budget through their box office collections.

Releasing a film can be as cheap, and as expensive as one wants. With fixed costs including the censor certificate, content mastering and cloning, digital cinema package charges, and variable costs including the film’s publicity and advertising campaign, it can cost as little as ₹15 lakhs and can scale up to ₹1.5 crores.

Generally, though, these independent films often do not have access to the carpet-bombing publicity and advertising budget that commercial films do — for hoardings, standees, or even to have their trailers play in theatres, which need to be paid for. And sometimes, even when you pay for the trailer, as Second Chance did, the aspect ratio of the film — often different from the usual commercial fare — is not accounted for and the subtitles get cut off.

“Mass media is not your friend, for nobody cares for an ad or hoarding or standee of an independent film. You need a personalised approach,” Shiladitya Bora notes. Instead, Bora, a film producer, director, marketer and distributor, who has theatrically released independent films such as Second Chance (2025), Barah by Barah (2024), Fairy Folk (2024), and Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (2022), believes that targeted screenings and community building and outreach is essential for such films.

Each film, therefore, brings with it its tailored marketing distribution strategy. Humans in the Loop, that follows an Adivasi woman who begins working as an AI data labeller, framed itself as a social impact film, got a grant for distribution, and after spending a year doing “micro-community” screenings in cultural institutions and universities across India, eventually got writer-director Kiran Rao and ethnographic filmmaker Biju Toppo on board in time for its theatrical release. This was a journey that built momentum and goodwill for a sustained period before arriving at the theatres. Humans in the Loop staggered its release, with a 5 September release date for Mumbai and a 12 September release date for other cities — Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Trivandrum, Chennai, and Jaipur.

Show and Tell

“We had once released a film in Patna, and did an outreach programme for that, building a database of five to six thousand people in Patna. When I had to release Bhagwan Bharose (2023) there, I tapped into that database. The film played for three weeks. It even had a 98 per cent occupancy during an India-Pakistan cricket match,” Bora tells THR India.

Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon, too, began with a single show per day at Cinepolis Andheri, in Mumbai. By the following Thursday, due to robust word of mouth, there were six shows per day. Three-and-a-half lakhs were gathered from a single theatre complex this way. After opening in seven screens in the first week, the movie expanded to 14 in the second week, adding even more cities in the following weeks — the film played in theatres for eight weeks. “Limited screens but super high occupancy is the key here,” Bora notes.

With Subhadra Mahajan’s Second Chance, a special screening was organised for members of the Women in Film India, alongside a special show for students of the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. Mahajan also reached out to film clubs, persuading them to make Second Chance their monthly screening.

Another way is to bring in familiar names on board as executive producers or distributors. “A proven and credible source helps to push the films through the theatrical pipeline. The first set of trade interviews we did, the trade press in India did not know Payal Kapadia. They might have heard of her Cannes win. But they knew [Telugu actor-producer and distributor] Rana Daggubati, and if he is backing something, it might make for an interesting conversation for their consumers,” producer and campaign strategist Neha Kaul says.

Similarly, Stolen banded together a set of executive producers known for their craft — Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikkhil Advani, Kiran Rao, and Anurag Kashyap — creating access points for the film, making it meatier for a streamer like Amazon Prime Video to pick it up for a direct-to-streaming release. The film is now playing in 240 countries and territories.

Given these tentpole names, a spokesperson (on conditions of anonymity) from Spirit Media — the company that distributed All We Imagine as Light (AWIAL) and Sabar Bonda — notes, “You have to be agile in these theatrical campaigns. For example, in Chandigarh we didn’t immediately get an audience for AWIAL. So, we withdrew our film from there. But a few weeks later, there was an inbound demand, and so we added the film back. Starting small and conservatively, being nimble, and then growing screens might help, because these films need that longer two-to-three- week window to build word of mouth for the audience to galvanise.” AWIAL played in Indian cinemas for six weeks, collecting around ₹1.9 crores according to Sacnilk.com.

For Sabar Bonda, a queer film set in a Maharashtrian village, also distributed by Spirit Media, the strategy was to reach out to eight queer community partners, from Humsafar Trust and Rainbow Literature Festival to Sweekar — a group for parents of LGBTQ+ people — and Gaysi, with the Keshav Suri Foundation promising to bring people to the screening. “It is important to find allies and partners, not just patrons,” Kaul notes. Kanawade is also travelling to universities, holding screenings in universities across Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune in the run up to the film’s theatrical release.

Revenue vs Recognition

Perhaps the metrics of success for independent films must be more forgiving. AWIAL, for example, generated enough conversation for Jio Hotstar to pick it up for their streaming platform — an exception, given most indie films languish after their festival run, with no platform willing to house them. These are the “downstream” effects of a theatrical release and must be baked into the idea of the film’s “success”.

Besides, for independent films to be profitable in the long run, “We need a habit shift and consistency. You need to know every Wednesday if I go to so-and-so theatre, I can see an independent film,” Kaul notes.

One way of doing that is also by looking beyond the theatrical ecosystem. Mathivanan Rajendran, the producer of Humans in The Loop, notes that the intention of developing a decentralised micro-community model of distributing independent films was so it could be built to scale. “We want to build a network of decentralised micro-communities who we can tap into at any single given point and release a film. But we still need to see how the monetisation of this looks like in the future.”

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