Films by and about women at last finding an audience in India

India's cinema and society is changing, and women are at the forefront. A striking aspect of this year's London Indian Film Festival, which concludes today, has been the strength of its female contribution, with women producers, directors and lead characters dominating the schedule.

The most explicit example of this is Nirbashito (Banished), a Bengali film clearly inspired by the life of Taslima Nasrin, the writer who was hounded from her native Bangladesh for her outspoken views on women's rights, secularism, and religious freedom. After living in exile in the US and Europe, she found temporary refuge in Calcutta, but was then driven from that city and forced to live in Delhi.

Islamic extremists subsequently drove her from India entirely, and she now lives back in the US. Nirbashito's central character remains unnamed, but bears a close physical and political resemblance to Nasrin, and explores the isolation and dislocation of a woman writer in exile. Churni Ganguly, the film's writer and director, regards the movie as a labour of love about one of the subcontinent's most important authors. "It is a voice that needs to be heard," she says. "Women are not really emancipated or allowed to grow beyond expected limits. Not many people thought I would get it made. But I stuck to my script and my story. If you believe in what you're doing, it's possible."

Nirbashito is an honest and melancholic film. While it shows the strength and determination of its protagonist, faced with death threats and loneliness, it doesn't sentimentalise the issues. There is no illusion that the independent, free-thinking woman is certain to win in this struggle of ideas. Indeed, given the hugeness of the challenge, there is the strong suspicion that it might be all in vain. "It's a fight between the pen and the sword," says the exiled writer, "and the sword always wins."

Another explicitly political film is The Last Adieu, by the respected actor and director Shabnam Sukhdev, about her father, Sukhdev Singh Sandhu (popularly known as Sukhdev), one of the pioneers of Indian documentary filmmaking.