Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies has been chosen as India’s official entry at the Oscars 2025 in the Best Foreign Film category. Earlier, in a chat with NDTV, the director gave a shout-out to anyone interested in promoting the film. She said, “Definitely want to get this film out to many, many more schools, colleges, women across the country. I don’t know, through social groups, through other organisations. I want to do that somehow. Through NGOs… NGOs have screenings. This is a shout-out to anybody who would like to collaborate. I’m happy to bring the film and show it and start conversations because this is a conversation-starter film.”
Kiran Rao added, “I definitely think it can go much, much wider than it has. Now the cinema infrastructure has changed so much. The business is completely altered. We can’t really reach huge mass everywhere because now even single screens have been replaced by multiplexes, which are quite unaffordable to a large section of our society.”
Kiran Rao also mentioned that even though Laapataa Ladies is based in a rural setting and tells the stories of women from small villages, several women in big cities also related to the story. She said, “We tend to think that women in rural India or semi-urban India need to watch this film. On the contrary, I find it’s a story that’s so universal. I’ve had people from cities tell me how deeply it connected with their experience, with problems and struggles that they’ve had. Women face issues of guilt, whether it’s keeping pace with their job, whether it’s getting back to work after having a child. These are things that women face regardless of where they are, regardless of the starter of society.”
Kiran Rao claimed that it was much harder for her film as it has no big stars and dance numbers to increase its mass appeal. She said, “We can’t really reach huge mass everywhere because now even single screens have been replaced by multiplexes, which are quite unaffordable to a large section of our society. So if you do want to reach them, it is harder, and especially with a film like mine, which doesn’t have big stars and VFX and dance numbers. So I would really agree that it’s not gone as wide as I would like. And I guess I should have known this when you make these decisions to make the films that I make. It is something that is a struggle.”
Laapataa Ladies is an on-screen adaptation of Biplab Goswami’s award-winning story. While Sneha Desai wrote the screenplay and dialogues for the film, Divyanidhi Sharma took care of the additional dialogues. The movie was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last year as well. It was released on the big screens in India on March 1, 2024.