Working Girls

Surabhi Sharma / Long Documentary / India / Tamil, Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Malayalam, Telugu with English subtitles / 02:13:00 / 2025

Working Girls is a vivid, genre-defying documentary that traverses India to uncover the invisible yet essential work performed by women — from care work and domestic work to surrogacy and sex work. Filmed in Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong, Latur, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad and Madurai, the film meets domestic workers, farmers, mothers, ASHA workers, dancers, and organisers whose labour sustains society but is rarely acknowledged.

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, the film invites us to rethink what it means to work — and who gets to be seen as a worker.

Cast & Crew: 

  • WRITER-DIRECTOR Paromita Vohra  CONCEPT Prabha Kotiswaran
  • CAMERA Avijit Mukul Kishore   EDITING Nishant Radhakrishnan, Sankalp Meshram
  • SOUND Achuth Sahadevan, Namshad Hameed, Rajesh Saseendran, Sneha Sundar and others MUSIC  Bonnie Chakraborty SOUND MIX  Gissy Michael

Director’s Bio

Surabhi Sharma

    Paromita Vohra is a documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and teacher based in Mumbai, India. She is the director of over half dozen documentaries interrogating the social, political and cultural meanings of the contemporary urban Indian landscape. These include issues of ethnic chauvinism, women’s access to public space, state crackdowns on public ‘immorality,’ globalization, cosmopolitanism, diversity and social justice. She is particularly recognized for her innovative filmmaking techniques, including blending fiction and documentary. Her films have been screened at film festivals around the world, and her fictional and non-fictional writings have been published widely.

    Her work as a writer includes the feature films Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters), about a woman whose life is transformed by growing fundamentalism in a Pakistani village (dir: Sabiha Sumar), for which she won the Best Screenplay Award at the Kara Film Festival, 2003 and Khamoshi: The Musical (Additional Scriptwriting) (dir: Sanjay Leela Bhansali); the documentaries Skin Deep, A Few Things I Know About Her and If You Pause: In a Museum of Craft, as well as a series of short fiction films on communal conflict for the People’s Decade of Human Rights Education (PDHRE).