In recent decades, films with female leads have performed well at the box office. Yet, there has been an assumption that producers do not support female-led films, and that they are generally less successful. During a recent session at IFFI, Karan Johar spoke about how gender is not a criterion for judging a story.

“Telling the story of a female comes naturally to me. I’m not even thinking that it is something great I’m doing; it is something that comes naturally, whether it was Raazi, Gunjan Saxena, Ae Watan Mere Watan, or the short films I have directed like Bombay Talkies. It comes naturally that women in my films have agency. These are natural, organic decisions that come from the roots of my upbringing, and I will continue to tell those stories.”

Talking about box office performances of female-led films, Karan pointed out how cinemas were written off, yet both cinemas and OTT have maintained their strong positions. Giving the example of 12th Fail, he added, “It was being said that small films would not be able to attract a theater audience, but look at the performance of 12th Fail. So, one can’t follow any trend, and the only trend that one should follow is the conviction of storytelling.”

Responding to a query on why he doesn’t make films in other Indian languages, Karan said that the language he is comfortable telling a story in is Hindi, as it’s the language he was raised in. However, he added that he is a fan of all Indian language films.

“I was one of the first people to introduce Baahubali to the Hindis-peaking audience of this country. I believe that films made in (all) languages, whether it’s Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu or Tamil are outstanding. Thanks to streaming platforms, we can now see these movies and fall in love with the power of these stories. I’m blown away by the impact of Mani Ratnam’s PS-I and PS-II films, by KGF which has opened doors for Kannada cinema, and equally by mainstream films like Pushpa or RRR. So much is happening in Hindi cinema, but at the same time, so much is happening in Indian cinema, and we should be proud members of Indian cinema.”