When Homebound premiered at Cannes this year, its stillness spoke louder than spectacle. Directed by Neeraj Ghaywan and backed by Dharma Productions, the film, starring Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, and Janhvi Kapoor, opens with two friends waiting for a police entrance exam in rural North India. They sit quietly, one scrolling through a phone, the other lost in thought. The silence between them carries the unspoken heaviness of caste, ambition, and stalled dreams. It’s a moment that doesn’t use any music or movement; it just lingers. And that’s what makes it significant—not just as a film, but as a sign of change.
Bollywood, long known for its flashiness in visuals, emotions, and scale, is beginning to borrow the tone, rhythm, and soul of independent cinema. The shift is not just about box office numbers or platform releases. It’s about a deeper change in how stories are told and why. As Ghaywan reflects, “I wanted to make a film that breathes, that allows silence to speak, and that trusts the audience to feel without being told.”
This tonal shift is a sign that even mainstream cinema is now starting to trust subtlety. The growing embrace of author-driven storytelling found its most global affirmation in 2024 with All We Imagine as Light. Directed by Payal Kapadia and made outside the traditional studio system, the film won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2024, making history as the first Indian film in three decades to compete in the main competition. But its significance goes beyond the award. The plot follows the inner lives of two nurses in Mumbai with a kind of atmospheric tenderness that’s rarely seen in mainstream cinema. Despite its deliberate pacing and lack of spectacle, it struck a chord with audiences and critics alike, proving that deeply personal stories rooted in realism can resonate on a global scale.
There are also films like Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, which trade melodrama for emotional nuance by using pauses and glances instead of sensational monologues. Arjun Varain Singh, who directed the Netflix release, says he wanted the film to feel like a time capsule. “Something that captures what it means to be 25 right now—all the insecurity, the performance, the longing,” he tells Rolling Stone India. The result is a story where the emotional weight comes not from scale, but from observation—a hallmark of indie filmmaking. Singh calls it “a commercial movie with an indie soul,” and it shows in how the film listens more than it speaks.
That sparseness also slips into the way these films look. Indie cinema has long relied on elements like natural light, real homes, and unpolished locations—not because of budget constraints alone, but to honour the spaces where these stories actually come from. Kiran Rao’s small-budget production Laapataa Ladies embraced this fully. Shot on location in rural India, with a cast of mostly fresh faces, the film felt textured and true. And despite the plagiarism accusations, its success, both critical and commercial, proved that visual restraint is not a limitation—it’s a language. One that audiences clearly understand.
Another major change is in narrative structure. Instead of the neat arcs and dramatic crescendos that Bollywood often favours, we’re seeing more elliptical, open-ended stories. Films like Sir, Masaan, and Ship of Theseus—all independent in origin—led the way in showing how life rarely wraps up in climaxes. That influence now echoes in studio-backed films that are willing to end with ambiguity. Poulomi Das, a film critic, points out examples like the film Sardar Udham, which she says didn’t chase a patriotic high, but instead “reframed patriotism as grief.” “That’s not something you expect from a mainstream biopic, but it worked because it didn’t try to perform the emotion—it just held it.”
This leads to a fourth shift: a stronger focus on lived experience over plot. Where earlier films often constructed characters around events, today’s emerging stories are building events around emotional truths. The Lunchbox, released in 2013, offered an early glimpse of this, using a single misdelivered tiffin to explore feelings of loneliness and unexpected connections. That inwardness—emotional rather than situational—is now being taken seriously by larger production houses. Even films like Thappad operate within domestic interiors, yet feel vast in their emotional impact. These are not event films. They are felt in films.
The earlier belief that viewers needed constant stimulation no longer holds true. Films with slower pacing and emotional nuance—like Pagglait or Kaamyaab—found loyal followings on streaming platforms because they didn’t cater to attention, but simply respected it. Nancy Beso, a producer known for indie films like the Naga short Angh, says, “People connect to stories that feel honest. They’re tired of being told what to feel. They want to feel it themselves.” This shift in audience sensibility is what gives this moment weight. It’s not just that filmmakers are taking risks—it’s that viewers are showing up to meet them halfway.
But not all imitations are sincere. Poulomi Das points out that Bollywood often borrows from indie cinema but sidesteps its risk. “Bollywood is great at copying the vibe—the muted colours, the handheld camera—but rarely the emotional or creative risk,” she says. She points to the film Superboys of Malegaon as a recent example of this. Loosely based on Faiza Ahmad Khan’s documentary Supermen of Malegaon, the feature film recreates the setting and style, but not the heart. In the original, Nasir isn’t chasing success or recognition—he’s making films for the pure love of storytelling.
That singular passion, as one review noted, gets overshadowed in the feature, which adds scripted conflicts and convenient resolutions. The film, determined to be a feel-good story, wraps everything up neatly for audience applause. It succeeds in entertainment value, but in doing so, it dilutes the very spirit that made the original so moving. It becomes an example of what happens when the indie aesthetic is lifted, but the indie impulse is left behind.
But if a film like Homebound—starring known faces, produced by a legacy banner, and distributed on a global platform — can still feel quiet, unsure, tender, and deeply personal, then something is changing. Perhaps for the first time in years, Bollywood isn’t chasing indie cinema to imitate it, but to understand what makes it stay.
What makes a film feel independent isn’t its budget or cast. It’s the reason it exists. Is it shaped around truth, or around trend? Was it written to be felt, or to be optimised? The best of this new Hindi cinema carries those answers not in statements, but in its silences. And in a culture that has so often equated scale with significance, the quietest stories might just be the ones rewriting the future.