Best Ever Hindi Films by Women Directors

Women make movies too. Unfortunately, not quite as often.

With Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara hitting screens this Friday, we thought we'd take a look at the best Hindi-language films made by women, and found disturbingly few nominees. However, this is a time of hope, and to all those young women making movies now -- Zoya, Kiran Rao, Nandita Das -- here are 10 films to look at and be inspired by, 10 very significant films.

Here, in no particular order, are 10 films made by women. And the sheer range on display is laudable.

Sparsh (1980)
Director: Sai Paranjpye

A delicately sensitive work of art depicting a pure, flawed, fantastical romance, and one that makes us question which of us has vision and what we choose to see with it.

Naseeruddin Shah, in one of the greatest screen performances, plays a blind principal and Shabana Azmi, his visually-unimpaired heroine, provides a perfect foil to his character in this deeply stirring drama.

Director: Farah Khan

Farah Khan knows entertainment, and this film delivers it all with larger-than-life Manmohan Desai sized dollops of cheese.

A rollicking tribute to 1970s Bollywood, the film peppered with in-jokes features the biggest movie star in the world playing a starry-eyed extra who dies and is reincarnated to realise that being born a Kapoor makes for a whole different Bollywood experience.

Director: Sai Paranjpye

A simple tortoise and hare tale set in the necessarily cosy environs of a tightly crammed Mumbai shawl, this one was made special both by Paranjpye's casting against type and by the way cynicism and na vet walked hand in hand.

It's a bittersweet fable, and Naseer and Farooque Shaikh are fabulous.

Director: Mira Nair

Mira Nair's strikingly close look at children living in the underbelly of Bombay city was a revolutionary, visceral punch to the gut for anyone watching, be it in South Bombay or the South of France, at whose Cannes festival it won not only the audience award but also the Golden Camera award for best first film.

With a bunch of young protagonists with unforgettable names -- Chaipau, Solah Saal and even Raghubir Yadav's Chillum -- this is a film worth watching many times over.

Director: Sai Paranjpye

That the greatest bromance in the history of Hindi cinema is to be found in an 1980s indie directed by a woman speaks volumes, just like each of the delicately nuanced touches in this masterpiece.

From the way Rakesh Bedi stubs out his cigarette with a flourish as he prepares to hide his desolate reality with a barrage of lies to the way neighborhood paanwallah Lallan Mia is taken along to watch a play in lieu of cigarette dues, this one's an immaculately acted stunner and definitely the finest film on this list.

Director: Mira Nair

The bustle and bluster of a typical North Indian wedding has much pomp and as much written between the lines, and Nair explored that in this solid feature about a Delhi shaadi bursting at the seams with subtext and hypocrisy.

Great performances ran through the film -- from Lilette Dubey and Shefali Shah to Roshan Seth and Naseeruddin Shah -- but the highlight was Vijay Raaz, playing a marigold-chewing wedding contractor who gives the film heart.

Director: Deepa Mehta

Loosely based on Ismat Chugtai's Lihaf, this Deepa Mehta film -- while incendiary for being our only genuine celluloid exploration of lesbianism -- is a very well crafted movie, a motion picture of fine pacing and wonderful narrative highs.

A powerful drama about marriage, fidelity and desire, the film boasts of standout performances from the leads Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi, and a great turn by Ranjit Chowdhry, playing the family servant Mundu.

Director: Kalpana Lajmi

A tale of the real tears behind the life of the hired mourner, Lajmi's take on a Mahasweta Devi short story is a bleak and beautiful story of grief and longing.

With a phenomenal soundtrack by Bhupen Hazarika, the film features Amjad Khan in one of his final roles but belongs overwhelmingly to Dimple Kapadia who, playing the film's stoic lead Shanichari, delivers the finest performance of her career.

Director: Deepa Mehta

Popular in the festival circuit abroad largely because it brought interested onlookers a Partition story they were not as familiar with, Mehta's Earth has cinematic merits evident even to us who have seen it all before.

A well-crafted adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice Candy Man, it centres around the luminous Nandita Das and a very good Rahul Khanna as her lover. Aamir Khan might have been all red-eyes and bluster, but somehow that overstatement worked well with AR Rahman's delicious soundtrack.

Director: Anusha Rizvi

I'm not the biggest fan of Rizvi's film, largely because it treads exclusively familiar ground. Then again, it is quite a well-made film, one whose narrative hooks you simply and irresistibly, and drags you along more than efficiently.

The performances are almost entirely fantastic -- Nawazuddin Sheikh, Omkar Das Manikpuri and Raghubir Yadav are all excellent -- and the film provided respite to those of us tired of the routine Friday fodder.