Laapataa Ladies is India’s entry for 2025 Oscars under Foreign Film Category, announced Film Federation of India on Monday. Film Federation of India Chairman Jahnu Barua announced the news. The film has been selected from all India nominations of 12 Hindi films, 6 Tamil and 4 Malayalam films. The jury has been led by 13 members this year. The film was contending alongside 29 film including names such as Animal, Kill, Kalki 2898 AD, Srikanth, Chandu Champion, Joram, Maidaan, Sam Bahadur, Article 370, the Malayalam film Aattam, which won the National Award for Best Feature Film this year and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, a Cannes winner. Laapataa Ladies is directed by Kiran Rao and produced by Kiran Rao, Aamir Khan, Jyoti Deshpande. The film had a fresh bunch of faces. Nitanshi Goel, Pratibha Ranta, Sparsh Shrivastav, Chhaya Kadam, Ravi Kishan featured in the film.
Laapataa Ladies is based on an award-winning story by Biplab Goswami. The screenplay and dialogue are written by Sneha Desai, while Divyanidhi Sharma has taken care of the additional dialogues. Laapataa Ladies had a screening at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last year. The film was released in theatres in India on March 1. The film has been applauded by critics and audiences alike. Despite not minting a whopping amount of money at the box office, the film garnered a new fanbase after it was released on the streaming giant Netflix.
Earlier this month, Kiran Rao shared a snippet from the film on social media and she captioned it, “Laapataa Ladies will be found in Japan from October 4, 2024. We are so excited for our theatrical release in Japan by Shochiku, Japan – arigato gozaimasu.” The film is a take against the patriarchal shackles which tend to bind women’s aspirations and dreams within the four walls of domesticity.
The film opened to largely positive reviews from film critics. In his review for NDTV, film critic Saibal Chatterjee gave Laapataa Ladies 3.5 stars out of 5 and he wrote, “Adapted from a story by Biplab Goswami and scripted by Sneha Desai (who has also written the dialogues with additional inputs from Divyanidhi Sharma), Laapataa Ladies is a social satire with a pronounced feminist accent that gives the film its rationale. The film is breezy and light on its feet. It is never, therefore, in danger of being bogged down by the weighty issues that it addresses. Its simple clarion call is in favour of the rights of women who are robbed of their dreams post-marriage and it is couched in simple methods that do not seek to draw too much attention to themselves.”