Working Girls
Director: Paromita Vohra
Country: India
Language: Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali
Duration: 134 mins
Year: 2025
Working Girls is a vivid genre-defying documentary that traverses India to uncover the invisible yet essential labour performed by women. Moving through Kolkata, Mumbai, Madurai, Shillong, Latur, Thiruvananthapuram, and Hyderabad, the film meets domestic workers, ASHA workers, sex workers, dancers, surrogates — women whose relentless labour sustains cities yet remains unacknowledged, often cloaked with shame. In tracing their labour, the film quietly explores how the ‘working girls’ of our society navigate the borders of class, geography, and legality, in the process also blurring the distinctions between many other borders: moral and marketable labour, “respectable” work and stigmatised work, choice and compulsion, and invisibilisation and resistance. With biting humour, powerful music, and a deep dive into the histories of law and gender, Working Girls challenges dominant ideas about labour, value, and visibility. Directed by Paromita Vohra and created in collaboration with the Laws of Social Reproduction project, building on their research, the film invites us to rethink what it means to work — and who gets to be seen as a worker.
About the Director
Paromita Vohra
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose films, online videos, art installations and television programming, explore feminism, gender, desire, urban life and popular culture. She is the director of several documentaries including Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra?, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Partners in Crime and most recently, Working Girls. She has written the film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters), the comic Priya’s Mirror, the play Ishqiya Dharavi Ishtyle and also wrote a weekly newspaper column ‘Paronormal Activity’ for 15 years. In 2015, she founded Agents of Ishq, a pioneering multimedia digital platform which has transformed conversations on sex, love and desire in India. In a world obsessed with binaries, her body of work has consistently championed multiplicity, rejecting neat categories between fiction and documentary, humour and critique, and the personal and the political.
Meet the Director!
Paromita Vohra is visiting the festival on 21 March 2026!