How Two Oscars Breakouts Are Charting New Paths for Indian Cinema at TIFF with ‘Dorothy’ and ‘Termite’

You might remember the 2023 Academy Awards for the ascendance of “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” But it was also a historic year for Indian cinema. The stateside craze over “RRR,” the Telugu-language Indian action bonanza, reached a crescendo when it danced its way to the Oscar for Best Original Song. Another winner that evening was producer Guneet Monga Kapoor, nabbing the Oscar for Documentary Short for “The Elephant Whisperers.” Shaunak Sen’s “All That Breathes” was also nominated for Documentary Feature after winning top prizes at Sundance and Cannes. The South Asian community had plenty to cheer about that night.

As the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival rolls around, the community again has much to be excited about, with nearly a dozen films from the subcontinent across the lineup. Sen and Monga Kapoor will meet in Toronto again, each celebrating a career milestone with their premieres on Friday.

“Termite,” a poetic short about a Delhi exterminator whose roommate gets an unexpected marriage proposal, is Sen’s first film as a director after “All That Breathes,” and his fiction debut. Monga Kapoor unveils “Dorothy,” a gangster western directed by Karthik Subbaraj, making it the first feature from the renowned Tamil director to premiere at a major festival. His previous nine, including “Mercury” and “Jigarthanda,” had direct theatrical releases. Significantly, “Dorothy” is Monga Kapoor’s first film after India’s leading entertainment company, Jio Studios (the content arm of Reliance Industries), acquired a majority stake in her and Achin Jain’s storied production company, Sikhya Entertainment, earlier this year.

“Dorothy” and “Termite” could not be more different, and their paths to TIFF illustrate the fascinating contrasts in creative collaborations, financing landscapes, and visions behind the slates built by Sikhya as a studio and KiteRabbit, the production company Sen and his producing partner Aman Mann started with “All That Breathes.” IndieWire caught up with Sen, Monga Kapoor, and Subbaraj the week before TIFF, as they reflected on the challenging and productive years since the 2023 Oscars.

Getting an Oscar nomination, Sen said, “is one of those landmark events that still retains an aura of warm fuzzy disbelief. In hard pragmatic terms, it gets you the meetings you want. But on a more spiritual level, you start thinking of the ceiling of your work differently. What would have otherwise been unfathomably distant now feels more within the matrix of ambition.” Sen and Mann began populating a slate for KiteRabbit to continue work in nonfiction, “with the tentative aim to dip their toes into fiction.”

“Every independent filmmaker is inherently a radical autodidact in that you must always be collecting new pathways because [there are no] pre-existing templates,” said Sen. “It’s staggering how few people in India know independent producing that is not studio-backed.” The exception is independent documentaries, which have fared well. “All those guys have opened their own production houses. Aman and I [also] started producing quite voraciously.”

A life-changing event would rout and then catalyze Sen’s plans.

“I got a shock kidney cancer diagnosis not soon after the Oscars. And my way of coping with it was to displace the sudden jolt of it onto a kind of creative fodder. I started filming everything happening around me. So my next film is a portrait of a vascular surgery team, my own experiences with sickness, and a meditation on mortality, the body, and Delhi.” This documentary, called “The Delicate,” is KiteRabbit’s main project in the last two and a half years, and Sen — now thankfully cancer-free — was editing it in Copenhagen at the time of the interview.

Another notable consequence of being on the awards circuit was Joaquin Phoenix reaching out to Sen. Phoenix, a big fan of “All That Breathes,” “was interested in working on a film on a community about whom he had somehow researched a lot and read several news articles on,” Sen said. “He wanted me to do something with it. I thought it should be a woman film director, and I recommended suitable candidates. Eventually, [someone called] Archana Phadke was the right choice. Today, KiteRabbit is co-producing the documentary with Phoenix, Rooney Mara, and Jim Wilson.”

The Oscar nomination also sparked interest in investing in KiteRabbit. Sen, who feels it takes him at least two and a half years to mount a project, didn’t want to say “not now,” nor did he want to direct anything random. So instead, he brought those resources to people he admired, filmmakers like Pallavi Paul and Anmol Siddhu (“Jaggi”). A total of five works spanning fiction and nonfiction, short and feature-length, are on KiteRabbit’s producing slate, all representing “independent, high quality cinema.” “There’s really no desire for doing a commercial potboiler,” he said, and in that respect, “our model is different from Sikhya’s.”

Speaking of mainstream cinema, Guneet Monga Kapoor has been on quite a different journey since her Oscar win. Known for producing indie festival hits like “The Lunchbox” and “Masaan,” she appeared really proud and excited to bring “Dorothy” to TIFF. “This is the first film that Sikhya has become a studio with, so it is one for the books.” After “The Elephant Whisperers,” Monga Kapoor continued producing everything, from festival-bound indies like “The Fable” to bigger action films like “Kill” and live-action shorts like “Anuja,” which received an Oscar nomination in 2025.

In fact, back in 2016, when Monga Kapoor was on yet the awards trail promoting India’s submission, “Visaaranai,” she met Karthik Subbaraj for the first time. Of that encounter, she said, “We had been admirers of each other’s work for long, but we worked in different markets.” So nearly a decade later, when Kapoor was in talks with Jio and was looking to add projects to her slate, she listened to Karthik’s proposal for her to produce “Dorothy.”

Guneet Monga at the 97th Oscars held at the Dolby Theatre on March 2, 2025 in Hollywood, California.Lexie Moreland/WWD

The exact plot details of the blockbuster gangster western — whose score is composed by legendary maestro Ilaiyaraja — are being kept under strict wraps, though the TIFF program note describes the film as “set in the early 1990s in a rural Tamil Nadu shaped by caste, violence, and toxic masculinity.” There, the “lives of two inseparable friends are transformed by the arrival of Dorothy [played by Keerthy Suresh], a woman whose compassion quietly challenges the world around them.” The press notes state that the friends, played by relative newcomers Rishikanth and Sananth — as opposed to South Indian superstars like Rajinikanth and Suriya who have headlined Subbaraj’s earlier works — harbor a “dark secret” and embark on “a mysterious journey” of “self-discovery and redemption.”

Subbaraj shared that the story has been with him for a long time, and he began writing a draft during COVID, with input from novelist Saravanan Chandran. As he circulated it within the regional Tamil industry, the feedback he kept getting was that the film wasn’t commercial enough and “needed a big star, a big girl.” Resolved to make it, Subbaraj said it occurred to him that Guneet, based out of Mumbai, would be right for it. She was highly experienced with festivals and the Oscars, which seemed to align with Subbaraj’s dream for the film.

Monga Kapoor said that it was “love at first sight” with “Dorothy.” “Here you enter a classic Karthik Subbaraj world and then turn it around to tell such a sensitive, beautiful story set in the world of gangsters. At the time, we had made all our business plans for [the partnership stake with] Jio Studios. We had a slate and had all these conversations in fancy boardrooms. And yet we never thought our first film with Jio would be a Tamil-language film. [Sikhya and Jio] work here in Bombay. I have a one-arm distance from this. I, too, was guided through “Dorothy” from Karthik’s viewpoint, and experienced it through subtitles. While the whole Jio conversation took a year to close, we were sure about “Dorothy” more than anything else. We had already shot the film by December [2025], and we closed the Jio deal in February [2026].”

Speaking of production war stories, “Termite” and “Dorothy” could not be more distinct. Monga Kapoor raves about the “phenomenal, unimaginable speed” at which Subbaraj worked, the fastest she’s seen in her career. Pre-production began around August-September 2025, including casting and auditions for supporting roles in and around rural Madurai, where much of the story is set. Principal photography consisted of a challenging 41 days in November and December. By January, Karthik, working round the clock like in a “factory,” had several cuts ready to show Monga Kapoor against any note she might have had. She found this alacrity “adorable,” as she did the fact that Karthik wasn’t used to sending links on Vimeo.

By stark contrast, Sen quipped that shooting “Termite” in five days made him realize that he is not as “bilingual as my cinephile tastes would indicate.” Habituated to working in nonfiction that “requires a solipsistic, hermetically sealed immersion,” a “tapasya” (penance) of sorts, “the rhythms of the space you’re shooting” only become clear after “accidents and contingencies become more apparent.” Having somehow avoided working on a fiction film set all his life, Sen felt like a complete novice, totally not used to, say, the possibility of losing a location if you don’t get your shot by the end of a day. That’s why he feels a “bit mixed” about [“Termite”] going to TIFF, because he thought it would be like a “quick small practice, like a fiction warm-up.”

Shaunak Sen at The 75th Annual DGA Awards held at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 18, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California.Michael Buckner/Variety

Yet in other ways, “Termite” well encapsulates the kind of “independent high quality cinema” which KiteRabbit wants to stand for. When pressed about the themes across his directorial work, Sen said that he’s interested in “the sense of entanglement through an ecological perspective. If ‘All That Breathes’ was about the abstract triangulation of air, birds, and humans, by the time we began ‘The Delicate,’ it had come kind of closer home to roost. In that, now my own body felt like it was the battlefield. And then it became a more personalized register through which to look through.

“But also there’s equal interest in deep passionate craft of any kind. The brothers [the subjects of “Breathes”] were treating thousands of birds, and the immersion, focus, and thereby plenitude that you get [during] your work is something I’m very seduced by. That is as true of surgeons. A surgery operation theater is an opera of concentration, absorption, and virtuoso focus. And that’s very exciting to me.”

Similarly in “Termite,” the [main character’s] immersion into the invisible world occupied by the titular pests takes a poetic form. Loosely inspired by a “feeling of texture” he encountered in the work of Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini, Sen shared something personal.

“The week before I got my cancer diagnosis,” said Sen, “was Aman’s, who’s my closest friend, wedding. And the week after was another close friend’s wedding. I remember that sandwiched between these two was this event that completely altered the horizon of what the future held for me. So I wrote a basic draft and started collaborating with this wonderfully gifted writer, Pew Banerjee. Eventually we [settled] on the theme of male middle-aged loneliness, or a tender, emotive male ennui” experienced by someone who is jaded but not cynical. “That texture was very interesting,” and moreover, “the more we read into it, the more we discovered it is a bit of an epidemic: the number of men in their late 40s and early 50s who report losing contact with their close friends.”

Sen is fully unsure if he has any Oscar plans for “Termite.” He first wants to test the film with an audience. He understands how to campaign documentary features but has no experience with the shorts circuit.

Monga Kapoor and Subbaraj indicated, however, they would be willing to campaign “Dorothy” for the Oscars. “We don’t know yet what will be India’s entry, but we hope they choose a film that has legs to go all the way. And I think a festival launch sits at the center of it,” said Monga Kapoor, which is why she hopes for a “whole conversation to build” starting with TIFF. They intend to release the film worldwide on September 25th, so the goal is to secure a U.S.-based distributor and marketing team since the Oscar is an American award.

Oscars or not, one of the thrusts behind Monga Kapoor and Subbaraj’s collaboration was the ambition for the film to travel. Given the film’s themes [under wrap], “we want to put this conversation out there at large,” said Monga Kapoor. “It’s very audacious to attempt [this kind of story] in a mainstream theatrical picture, the telling [of which] is not art house and sparse, but more like a “full-blown gangster film with music and songs, told in the syntax of mass [cinema].”

Given its themes of caste-based violence and other oppressions in rural Tamil Nadu, did Subbaraj feel he needed to make some aspects more legible for the film to travel? He said no. “There is a kind of demarcation when they say Tamil film for theatrical and for festivals. I wanted to eradicate that line and make a film that is celebrated by a mainstream Tamil theatrical audience and also liked by a foreign festival audience,” he said, arguing that toxic masculinity is universal, invariable to caste, religion, or race. Moreover, foreign films that he likes are rooted in their land, so he wanted to make “Dorothy” authentic to Madurai culture, and reflect the dream of these childhood friends to grow up and become gangsters. He is sure the emotions will connect. In fact, the team has already released two songs from the album, and the response has been fantastic.

Will Monga Kapoor lean into what made “RRR” so incredibly successful in order to market another South Indian mainstream action epic in the US? She said, “’RRR’ did amazing heavy lifting for all of us. It opened doors for Indian cinema at large. And my life’s work is talking about Indian cinema at large. I think the 2023 Oscars were an epitome of understanding Indian cinema. There was Shaunak Sen with ‘All That Breathes’ [set in Delhi, in North India]; me and Karthiki Gonsalves [director of ‘The Elephant Whisperers’] with a documentary from South India. And then was ‘RRR,’ the epitome of storytelling with all its colors.

“I think people like boxing everybody. But we are all Indian cinema at large. Shaunak’s film was also distributed mainstream by HBO. Our work was distributed by Netflix. [I want people] to understand that Tamil cinema is as big as Hindi cinema and Telugu cinema.  We are many cinema countries in one, all consuming each other’s cinema on subtitles. I just hope that the conversation ‘RRR’ started, we can take further in our own little way with “Dorothy.” Indian cinema is everything, everywhere all at once.”

“Dorothy” premieres at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11. “Termite” plays during the festival as part of TIFF’s shorts program.