2023

OSCAR WIN FOR THE ELEPHANT WHISPERERS

1st

INDIAN WOMAN TO WIN AN ACADEMY AWARD

2012

THE LUNCHBOX AT CANNES

20+

FILMS PRODUCED ACROSS A DECADE

THE BEGINNING

Guneet Monga grew up in Delhi, studied mass communication at Symbiosis in Pune, and came to Mumbai with no industry connections and a very clear idea of the kind of films she wanted to make. Not the kind that already existed. The kind that should exist but didn’t yet because no one had been willing to fund them.

She started Sikhya Entertainment in 2008, aged twenty-four. The name means education in Punjabi. The choice was deliberate: she wanted to make films that taught you something about the world, about people, about the particular texture of lives that mainstream cinema ignored. She had almost no money and no track record. What she had was taste, and the confidence to back it.

“She wanted to make films that taught you something about the world. She had almost no money and no track record. What she had was taste, and the confidence to back it.”

THE FILMS

The films Guneet Monga produced in the first decade of her career read like a map of everything Indian cinema was refusing to look at. Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) was a five-hour epic about coal mafia violence in Jharkhand that Anurag Kashyap had been trying to make for years and couldn’t get financed. She financed it. It went to Cannes and changed the conversation about what Indian films could be.

The Lunchbox (2013), directed by Ritesh Batra, was about loneliness and longing in Mumbai, told through a mistaken tiffin delivery. It was not a typical Bollywood film. It had no songs, no action, no stars in the conventional sense. It was quiet and precise and devastating. It sold to Sony Pictures Classics, screened at Cannes, and became one of the most internationally celebrated Indian films in years. Guneet Monga produced it at thirty.

2012

Gangs of Wasseypur

Cannes Directors’ Fortnight; redefined Indian crime cinema

2013

The Lunchbox

Cannes; sold to Sony Pictures Classics internationally

2015

Masaan

Cannes Un Certain Regard; two awards; Vicky Kaushal’s debut

2022

The Elephant Whisperers

Netflix; Academy Award for Best Documentary Short

Masaan (2015) went to Cannes and won two awards in the Un Certain Regard section. It introduced Vicky Kaushal to the world. It was about grief and caste and the particular cruelty of small-city India, told with a gentleness that made it almost unbearable to watch. These were not safe films. They were not films designed to protect the person producing them. They were films that asked difficult questions and trusted the audience to sit with the discomfort.

Also Read: The Women Who Went First – Part 38

THE OSCAR

MARCH 12, 2023 · DOLBY THEATRE, LOS ANGELES

When The Elephant Whisperers, directed by Kartiki Gonsalves, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film, Guneet Monga became the first Indian woman to win an Oscar as a producer. She stood on the stage at the Dolby Theatre and said: “This one’s for my country. Jai Hind.”

The film followed Bomman and Bellie, a couple from Tamil Nadu who care for orphaned elephant calves at the Theppakadu Elephant Camp in the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve. It was a film about tenderness, about the specific relationship between humans and animals, about a way of life that most of India has never seen. Netflix had picked it up. Guneet had believed in it before anyone else did.

The award was not a surprise to anyone who had watched what she had been building for fifteen years. It was the world catching up.

WHAT SHE BUILT

Beyond the films, Guneet Monga has been consistently outspoken about what the Indian film industry does to women: the casual exclusions, the assumption that production is a man’s job, the way female producers are treated as assistants until they are impossible to ignore. She did not become diplomatic about this as she became more successful. She became louder.

She has mentored younger filmmakers, particularly women, with a specificity that goes beyond inspiration. She tells them the actual things: how to structure a deal, how to hold a room, how to say no to the wrong money. The kind of knowledge that was never passed to her because there was no one ahead of her to pass it.

Sikhya Entertainment has now produced over twenty films. Several of them have gone to Cannes. Several have gone to the Oscars. None of them were made because they were safe bets. All of them were made because Guneet Monga decided they should exist.

“She tells them the actual things: how to structure a deal, how to hold a room, how to say no to the wrong money. The kind of knowledge that was never passed to her because there was no one ahead of her to pass it.”

CROSS-SERIES CONNECTION · ISSUE 38

Read alongside Devika Rani (Issue 38), and ninety years of Indian film history collapses into a single line: the women who ran the business of cinema were always the ones doing the most important work, and they were always the ones the industry tried hardest to overlook. Devika Rani built Bombay Talkies with her own hands and launched careers that defined an era. Guneet Monga built Sikhya Entertainment from nothing and launched careers that defined this one. The screen gets the credit. They did the work.

WHY SHE BELONGS IN THIS SERIES

Guneet Monga went first in the most literal sense: she walked into rooms where no Indian woman producer had walked before and she made things happen there. But the more interesting first is the one that is harder to see. She was the first to consistently bet on Indian stories that the industry had decided were too small, too quiet, too regional, too real. The Lunchbox was too small. Masaan was too quiet. The Elephant Whisperers was too niche. All of them turned out to be exactly the right size for the world. She knew that before the world did. That is what a first really looks like.

ISSUE 39 • CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT • ABOUTHER MAGAZINE
THE WOMEN WHO WENT FIRST