Tanuja Chandra: Making female stories has been my abiding love
On a luminous morning at Sattva Knowledge City, filmmaker Tanuja Chandra gently drew the audience into her world — one shaped by quiet observation, emotional honesty, and deep empathy. Fresh from the panel Reversing the Lens: Women Making Cinema at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, she reflected on storytelling that resists spectacle, foregrounds lived experience, and brings to light the often unseen strength of women — both within cinema and behind the camera.
She begins, “This venue is so beautiful and so vibrant. It being a Sunday, it’s like people just relaxing and walking around. I must say Hyderabad weather is lovely.”
What stayed with her most was the quality of listening. “I noticed that the audience was listening very carefully, and I appreciate that. Very often people are on their phones or doing something else, but here everybody was just listening, laughing, and enjoying. Then they also asked questions. So it was actually one of the best sessions I’ve had. It was really beautiful. I’m so happy,” she expresses.
Later in the afternoon was the screening of her documentary Aunty Sudha Aunty Radha (2019), and the screening, she says, still brings with it a familiar nervousness. She states, “I always get a little nervous before my film is shown. I should not take it for granted.”
Over the years since it was made, the film continues to travel. She notes, “It regularly travels with me, it takes me to places. It has brought me here. I’m so grateful for that — to my aunts also — because they made it possible. It is one of the joys of my life.”
Tanuja never went searching for this story; it existed long before the camera arrived. What emerged was a portrait of coexistence rather than conflict: “Two elderly ladies, both used walkers, fighting with each other, but loved each other deeply. They used to scold the help but also take care of the help. They gave each worker a piece of land, and whatever was grown there would go to the worker.”
The film came together purely on belief in the story. “I spoke to a girl I had worked with many years ago and said I was looking for a producer. The next day she called me and said, ‘Why don’t I produce it?’ Then I called all my A-list friends — the camera person, the sound person, the editing person. They all said, ‘It’s a beautiful story.’ There was no money, it was a very small budget, but they loved the story. So it was a team that came together only by the strength of the story,” Tanuja recounts.
She was conscious of resisting the usual portrayal of ageing as tragedy. “Old age is often shown as very sad and painful. I won’t discount that — it often is. Bodies are in pain. People are deserted by their families. I tell everybody — just record your grandparents, your aunts, and uncles. It’s recording history,” she notes.
But her aunts refused to define themselves by loss. That approach shaped the tone of the film. What surprised her most was the fierce independence the sisters had arrived at: “They don’t care what the world thinks anymore. That kind of independence can only be fantasised about. They deeply love each other. The younger one even says in the film that when one of us goes, it will be very difficult. I wish I had gone back again over months or years.”
Widowhood, in her film, is not framed through helplessness but through freedom. She explains, “In this film, both the widows seem to be the most free. All their lives they were looking after others. Only in old age have they become truly free. Women are resilient by nature because they have had to endure so much. Society has so much to learn from women.”
That belief runs through her entire career. She adds, “Making female stories has been my abiding love. There is so much to learn from the female soul.” For her, authenticity mattered more than visual polish. She allowed her cinematographers to move instinctively. She gushes, “I’m of the opinion that camera work should be in service of the story, in that way, it becomes the hero in itself.”
Looking ahead, Tanuja is cautiously hopeful. She is working on another documentary and has completed two feature screenplays. “Writing is the most difficult process and requires slow time. The scripts are ready,” she says. Now comes the hard part — getting the films made, as she points out, “All you do as a director is try to get the film made.” Still, she allows herself optimism. “I hope to make a movie this year,” she concludes.