What Makes The Movie 'Jugnuma: The Fable' Soar Is How Its Women Hold The Story

When I first watched Jugnuma, I didn’t walk away thinking about its myth or its wings. I kept thinking about the hands that built it. The film feels like it was made in whispers, in the quiet strength of people who don’t need to announce what they’re creating. Almost everything in it — the story, the light, the spaces, the emotional charge — carries the imprint of women. 

Written and directed by Reddy, the film brings together a team that feels like a constellation. There’s producer Nancy Nisa Beso, production designer and co-producer Juhi Agarwal, executive producer Guneet Monga Kapoor, casting director Tess Joseph, and actors Priyanka Bose, Tillotama Shome and Hiral Sidhu. Their collective presence doesn’t just influence the narrative; it defines the film’s architecture. 

Reddy often says that the film’s spirit was led by women. “All the female characters — Vanya, Nandini, Radha — are the soul of the film,” he explains. “Behind the camera, too, the women were its emotional core. Their intuition guided every rhythm.” That kind of acknowledgement is rare in Indian cinema, where women have long been celebrated on screen but rarely credited for the shape of what we see.

The difference becomes visible in the smallest details. Juhi Agarwal’s production design carries the emotional intelligence of memory. “I lived in that house for months,” she recalls. “Every object had to hold a story — a mother’s presence, a daughter’s rebellion, a trace of someone who once owned the space. Nothing should look arranged; it should feel remembered.” Her world-building captures a kind of lived intimacy. The home isn’t a set — it’s a feeling.

Producer Nancy Beso describes her approach in similar terms. “Jugnuma has a quiet mystery. Some stories need room to arrive on their own. My job was to protect that space, not control it.” It’s a rare description of producing in an industry obsessed with control, where most decisions are measured by visibility or volume. Protecting quietness becomes an act of faith.

That faith found an ally in Guneet Monga Kapoor, whose ability to back delicate, unhurried stories has redefined what Indian independent cinema can look like. “It reminded me why I love cinema,” she says. “It carries a soft kind of magic — something about inheritance and emotion, about what we pass on without realising.” The film feels like an extension of that philosophy. It doesn’t perform its significance; it unfolds.

Inside the story, that emotional continuity belongs to the women on screen. Priyanka Bose’s Nandini radiates both fragility and fire. “We made this film when the world felt uncertain,” she says. “The only truth was Nandini’s surrender. It wasn’t about giving up; it was about letting go.” Tillotama Shome, who plays Radha, sees that surrender as an act of love. “A mother telling her children a story isn’t about the story,” she says. “It’s how she keeps them close while trying not to fall apart herself.” Their performances carry the emotional honesty of women who are exhausted but unbroken.

The same sensibility runs through the film’s rhythm. Editor Siddharth Kapoor speaks about listening rather than cutting. “We didn’t want a conventional pace. The story needed to move like memory — slow, imperfect, breathing. Every silence had to mean something.” The film feels edited the way people remember: circular, partial, unfinished.

Casting director Tess Joseph saw her work as an act of weaving, not assembling. “We wanted the villagers’ voices and silences to feel as alive as the leads,” she says. “The thread between the real and the imagined shouldn’t feel sewn on; it should feel woven.” That word — woven — describes the film’s whole temperament. Nothing is added; everything grows into each other.

Taken together, these voices outline a significant shift in terrain. For decades, Indian cinema treated women as subjects of gaze, not as architects of form. The logic was: let her be seen, remarked upon, rescued or ruined. What we see now — Jugnuma being a case in point- is women shaping how cinema functions. They are repositioning craft, authorship and vision. Their work doesn’t merely question existing grammar; it rewrites it. 

When women direct, produce, design, and edit, cinema changes — not because it centres women, but because it trusts a different architecture. Films cease to emphasise declaration and begin privileging reception; they make space before they demand meaning. The camera no longer asserts; it observes. Noise gives way to nuance. That structural shift is culturally significant because it decouples authorship from dominance.

In the context of Indian cinema, where commercial models favour spectacle, star power and accelerated pace, Jugnuma signals patience as a form of power. It says: we will not hurriedly resolve. We will let things remain messy, layered, unfinished. This is cinema that trusts its viewers — and that trust is crafted, not assumed. The women behind the film made that trust felt.

What happens when this practice becomes more common across Indian cinema? You get stories that are less about heroics and more about harm, less about uproar and more about inheritance. You get frames that privilege listening over spectacle. You get cinema that doesn’t simply show the world but contains it. Jugnuma isn’t a female film in the traditional sense; it is evidence of what happens when women are central to how films are made — from blueprint to final cut. 

This doesn’t mean commercial success is easy, or that the films will always appear conventional. But it does mean that their authorship is becoming visible. What’s uncommon in this film — not just that women made it, but that the film acknowledges it — is its transparency of craft. You can see the fingerprints without the credits spelling them out.

As the curtains rise on this new filmic architecture, Jugnuma: The Fable will be remembered not only for its visual poise but for how it was made and by whom. In doing so, it offers a template or perhaps a promise: when women build cinema with agency, the frame doesn’t just shift shape, it changes consciousness.  

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