India on Screen: Stories with Soul
Indian cinema is quietly entering a new era. With digital platforms rising and audience expectations shifting, stories are becoming more grounded, personal, and emotionally layered. From regional gems to global acclaim, Indian filmmakers are breaking molds while staying rooted in truth. What’s emerging is a cinema of empathy, depth, and hope.
by Sonal Dabral
Indian cinema is undergoing a quiet but powerful transformation. As cities expand and digital access explodes, storytelling is shifting. Social norms are evolving—there’s more space for identity fluidity and questioning tradition—and the screen is reflecting that. Characters feel more real. Narratives are more grounded. And even big-budget films are engaging with deeper themes like gender, class, ambition, loneliness, and identity in new ways..
Audiences, too, are changing. With multiplexes becoming pricier, viewers are more selective. They’re rejecting empty spectacles—no matter the star power—and choosing meaning over marketing. The old Bollywood formula of “stars + songs = success” no longer holds. Today, the films that truly connect are those with soul: rich characters, emotional depth, and strong storytelling.
This is why many recent hits have come from regional industries. Films like RRR, Pushpa, and Kantara deliver on scale but never forget the story. They prove that emotional resonance is just as important as spectacle—and often, even more.
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A Love Letter to Turkish Cinema
I find the current Turkish cinema both amazing and intriguing. There’s a quiet power to it—something deeply meditative and emotionally truthful. It doesn’t rely on spectacle or overt drama, yet it leaves such a lasting impact. Turkish filmmakers have an incredible ability to create atmosphere, to build tension out of silence, and to explore complex emotional landscapes with subtlety and grace. It’s a cinema that trusts the audience to feel rather than be told.
My love for Turkish cinema began when I discovered Once Upon a Time in Anatolia nearly a decade ago. That film was a revelation—it opened up an entirely new cinematic vocabulary for me. Since then, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become one of my all-time favourite filmmakers. I’ve watched all his films—Kasaba, Clouds of May, Distant, Climates, Three Monkeys, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep, The Wild Pear Tree, and About Dry Grasses. Some of them, like Once Upon a Time, Winter Sleep, and The Wild Pear Tree, I’ve returned to more than once. These films remind me of the kind of cinema I want to make—stories with soul, characters with contradictions, and visuals that speak without needing to shout.
His cinema is on another plane. His characterisation is subtle, yet profoundly layered. And his shot-taking—those long, lingering, contemplative frames—feels like sheer cinematic poetry. Every scene breathes. Every silence speaks volumes.
There’s something deeply immersive and introspective about the way he constructs his stories. I would love to meet him one day—just to talk about the quiet power of stillness, and how he manages to say so much with so little.
I also greatly admire Fatih Akin’s early work—Head-On and The Edge of Heaven in particular. His energy, his treatment of identity and cultural dislocation, is raw and compelling. And Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Bal (Honey) is another film that stayed with me—so gentle, so lyrical, and emotionally profound in its quietude. Turkish cinema reminds me that you don’t need to shout to be heard. You can whisper—and still move the world.
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Read Sonal Dabral’s full feature in the second issue of Centre Mag.
