When producers at Namah Pictures – Shareen Mantri Kedia, Kishor Arora and Kanwal Kohli – approached him with the rights to Phoolan Devi’s dictated autobiography, his first instinct was to turn them down. He calls himself “a non-resident Indian Punjabi boy” with no natural claim to her story, and after making the International Emmy-winning “Delhi Crime,” he wasn’t sure he wanted to return to material of that intensity at all.
“Phoolan,” from Amazon MGM Studios and Namah Pictures, tells the story of Phoolan Devi, the impoverished teenager who became one of India’s most notorious bandits after enduring years of caste and gender-based violence in rural Uttar Pradesh, and who was later elected twice to India’s parliament before her assassination in 2001. Rather than chart her full life, the Hindi-language film, starring Sneha Kumari in the title role, isolates a single 48-hour standoff in which 2,000 armed police and paramilitary personnel surrounded a village to capture her, then 17 years old.
The producers persisted. Mehta read the book, which he describes as “harrowing,” hundreds of pages of first-person testimony he initially judged “unfilmable, undepictable.” What changed his mind wasn’t the book itself but a question the producers put to him: find your own relevance to today’s world, and they would back it.
That relevance arrived, Mehta says, out of something he’d carried since finishing “Delhi Crime.” The courageous woman at the center of that series survived long enough to give a dying statement, in the hope that her testimony would set a precedent and make the world safer for others. Years later, Mehta felt that hope hadn’t been borne out. “Is it time that we now show the more charged version of this, the angrier version of this?” he recalls asking himself. Where “Delhi Crime” centered a protector, “Phoolan” centers the person who has to survive the assault directly and still choose, against every incentive, to keep believing in humanity. Mehta calls what happened to Phoolan Devi a “literal illustration of a gender war” he has never seen depicted anywhere else in recorded history, matched by a resilience he says he’d also never encountered.
Mehta says telling her entire life story in one film wasn’t feasible given its scope, and that narrowing the frame to the siege let him explore power, systemic inequality and resistance without compressing decades of biography into a single narrative, while keeping the story from tipping into exploiting her for dramatic effect.
Mehta calls the film’s action language deliberately unlike genre convention. Conventional action cinema, in his description, is built to make violence feel cathartic; he wanted audiences instead to register scale and imbalance as fact rather than spectacle. That extends to the film’s recurring cutaways to animals, insects and birds along the Chambal River, which Mehta says are not a stylistic holdover from his Prime Video series “Poacher” but drawn directly from Phoolan Devi’s own writing. She wrote of feeling more comfortable among predators in the wild than among human beings, and Mehta says he wanted to honor that comfort by showing nature’s own reaction to what the men mobilizing against her were doing, including what happens to birds that stray too close to attack helicopters.
Comparisons to Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 “Bandit Queen” are, in Mehta’s telling, unavoidable and welcome. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that film,” he says. “My discovery of her began in that film.” He’d go on to work with Seema Biswas, the actor who played Phoolan Devi in that earlier film on his own feature directorial debut “Amal,” and says he carries real respect for what Kapur made. His reasoning for not simply following in that film’s footsteps is generational: he doesn’t believe today’s audiences would seek that film out on their own, which is part of what convinced him a new telling, built around a single episode rather than her full biography, was worth attempting. He says he hopes viewers who watch “Phoolan” go on to research the era and the subject themselves. Mehta is candid that his preparation leaned toward the written record over the genre’s screen history, saying of the broader Hindi dacoit-film tradition that “I did more reading than watching, actually.”
Research also took Mehta to the actual Chambal valley locations described in Phoolan Devi’s autobiography, where he spoke with villagers old enough to remember the siege firsthand – an episode that was never formally recorded and exists only in her account and the community’s oral memory. One detail from those conversations reshaped the film: multiple villagers independently corroborated the same account of a single officer among the 2,000 who behaved differently from the rest. Mehta says the discovery became, in his words, part of the reason the film needed to exist, offsetting Phoolan Devi’s story with what he calls “the counterpoint of what human beings are capable of doing to each other, both good and bad.”
That research also shaped a formal choice: the film’s worst violence is spoken, never shown. “I felt very strongly that it would cross an ethical line if I were to depict these things,” Mehta says. Once the story crosses into that territory, every line spoken is drawn directly from Phoolan Devi’s own writing, including a scene roughly four-fifths of the way through the film that Mehta says he tried only to illustrate, not interpret. He is explicit that this wasn’t restraint for its own sake: “I did not set out to show her as a victim, because I don’t believe she was a victim. I think she was somebody who found agency, hope, optimism, somehow compassion.”
Casting, per Mehta, hinged on unfamiliarity rather than name recognition. Casting director Mukesh Chhabra’s team searched central India for months before finding Sneha Kumari, a theatre actor from the Bundelkhand region making her feature debut in the title role; her mother tongue is Bundelkhandi, the same dialect spoken in the film, and Mehta says she arrived knowing more about the region than he could ever catch up on through study alone. Workshops built basic film craft and physical training around her, but on set, Mehta describes staging the siege sequences as unrehearsed in the moment: scenes were blocked and prepared without a camera present beforehand, but once filming began, he says, “you’re still reacting to an entire scene of a oppressive assault,” and Kumari’s in-the-moment survival instincts, not a fixed shot list, guided how those sequences were shot. “Her spirit guided us,” he says.
Anurag Thakur, cast as Constable Vijay, came to Mehta’s attention when he spotted him in a constable’s uniform outside a casting office before ever seeing his audition; Mehta had already noted Thakur’s work in “Black Warrant” by the time casting was finalized. Mehta says he wanted the character to arrive without an obvious bias in either direction, reasoning that a person actually present for the siege wouldn’t credibly complete a full ideological reversal in 48 hours, but could plausibly shift partway if simply reacting like any human being would to the injustice unfolding in front of him.
“Phoolan” is premiering at the Toronto Film Festival.