On Pattinapakkam beach, two women sit in their khaki uniforms, sharing fried fish, laughing, teasing each other, and humming old Tamil songs. They face the sea as Chennai stretches endlessly behind them—a city in which they spend every day steering their autos.
It is both the opening and closing image of Auto Queens, cinematographer and filmmaker Sraiyanti H's 2025 documentary following Leela and Mohana, two members of Chennai's Veera Pengal Munnetra Sangam (VPMS), India's first registered union of women auto drivers. Produced by The Storiculture Company, the film follows their everyday lives while becoming an exploration of women claiming space—in friendship, through anger, and within a city that rarely makes room for them.
Made with English subtitles, it was first screened at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2025, and recently in Delhi’s Alliance Francaise.
Finding the story
When Sraiyanti first began working on the documentary, she imagined a very different film. Having grown up in Chennai, she had always seen women auto drivers, though never in the numbers visible today. "I've seen women autodrivers even as a child, but it hasn't been to the scale that it is now, thanks to the efforts of VPMS and other unions," she says.
Researching the union, she realised there wasn't one story to tell, but many. "It was a lot of stories... People have covered trans autodrivers, people who have taken interviews and YouTube videos and all of that about the members of BPMS themselves."
Initially, she wanted to explore the lives of single mothers and how women auto drivers navigate a city divided by caste and religion. But the film slowly shifted as she spent time with Leela and Mohana during the initial days of filmmaking. Their contrasting personalities and deep friendship gradually became the emotional centre of the documentary.
"The first time I visited Mohanakka's house... something about their dynamic slowly made this idea evolve, like if we simplified the concept of a union to friendship, just so that people can understand it," says the director.
Music as memory
Against Chennai's crowded streets, Auto Queens is filled with old Tamil cinema music. Classics such as ‘Aayirathil Oruthi Aval’, sung by T. M. Soundararajan, and ‘Paadatha Pattellam Paada Vandhaal’ by P. B. Sreenivas drift through the autos, revealing both the women's personalities.
While Leela loves nostalgic romantic classics, Mohana enjoys energetic kuthu tracks. "Their friendship demanded romanticisation. I feel like we needed that in the film. We needed to show that there is a romance in a platonic relationship also. And platonic romance is extremely important, especially when we're building something like systemic change," she says. “While travelling together, there'd also be songs playing. And it was just the way that we made the film itself that was quite musical," she adds.
Running beneath their friendship is a recurring struggle for parking space. Throughout the documentary, Leela repeatedly argues with male auto drivers over where she can park, turning an everyday inconvenience into something much larger. "That's what actually started the thought on why can't we use that itself as one of the ways in which we show that it's also literally impossible to get space as a woman auto driver. And as a woman in general."
Rather than postcard images of Chennai, Sraiyanti wanted audiences to feel its congestion and constant movement, making the city another force the women negotiate every day.
Rage as resistance
Beyond the search for space, frustration and rage become central to the film. Leela's anger becomes her armour, a way of asserting herself in spaces traditionally dominated by men. "My rage is my armour," she tells Mohana in one of the film's most powerful moments.
Watching Leela challenge men on the streets made Sraiyanti reconsider her own relationship with anger. "We've been told as women that we shouldn't react, we shouldn't cause a scene, we should maintain peace," she says. Through Leela, she came to see rage not as something women should suppress but as another legitimate way of asserting themselves.
For Sraiyanti, it also reflected the reality that women still struggle to occupy public space freely. Whether sitting alone in a park, stopping for tea or simply claiming a place to stand, women continue to negotiate visibility in ways men rarely have to. Here, finding somewhere to park becomes both a daily battle and a quiet metaphor for demanding one's place in society.
In Auto Queens, claiming a parking spot, raising one's voice or simply sitting on the beach become acts of occupying space. The film returns to the shoreline where it began, reminding viewers that while the city's struggles continue, so does their friendship.