Every year, the Film Federation of India picks one film to send to the Oscars, and every year the internet loses its mind about it. This year it has a reason to, but not the usual one.
FFI has gone with Gondhal, a Marathi folk musical thriller directed by a first-timer, over Dhurandhar, the biggest Hindi grosser India has produced. On paper that sounds like a snub. In practice it is the single most interesting Oscar call India has made in years.
Gondhal is India’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards, which will be held in Los Angeles on 14 March 2027.
The film is directed by Santosh Davakhar, making his feature debut. The cast is led by Kishor Kadam, with Ishita Deshmukh, Yogesh Sohani, Nishad Bhoir and Anuj Prabhu. The music is by Ilaiyaraaja, which is already enough of a flex for one sentence.
The story follows Suman, a young bride trying to get out of a suffocating relationship, who weaponises her lover Sarjerao’s obsession with gondhal, the Maharashtrian devotional folk performance the film takes its name from. Scroll’s report describes her turning the ritual into what amounts to a deadly chess match. So: a folk form, a trapped woman, and a slow-burn power game. That is the pitch.
The selection jury was chaired by Kannada filmmaker P Sheshadri and included actor Tannishtha Chatterjee and production designer Bijon Dasgupta, alongside ten other industry professionals. It sifted through 33 entries. The decision, per FFI, was unanimous.
Sheshadri’s reasoning was blunt in the best way. He said this was the one film the jury was sure would land with both critics and a global audience, praising how it handles complicated human relationships through music and dance, and how cleanly the craft matches the material.
India’s Oscar entry has been a national argument since roughly forever. The country has three nominations in this category, all of them decades apart, and a long list of years where the pick was accused of being too safe, too commercial, or too obscure.
The last time a Marathi-adjacent art film went in, the conversation was identical: is FFI picking a film that can actually campaign in Los Angeles, or a film that looks good on an internal ballot?
What makes 2026 different is the shape of the shortlist it beat. Dhurandhar is not a small film. It is the highest-grossing Hindi film in India, and its sequel Dhurandhar 2 has pushed even further. Hanuman Ansh, Ikkis and Main Vaapas Aaunga were also in the running. FFI looked at a slate containing a genuine blockbuster and went with a debut director’s folk musical instead.
Confirmed across multiple independent outlets:
Gondhal is the official Indian entry to the Oscars 2027. Santosh Davakhar directs, in his first feature. Ilaiyaraaja composed the score. Kishor Kadam leads the cast. The jury was headed by P Sheshadri and the choice was made from 33 submissions. The film premiered in November 2025 and is being lined up for a re-release in India along with international distribution.
What is not confirmed, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: nobody has announced a campaign budget, a US distributor, or a release strategy for the American awards window. Those are the numbers that actually decide whether an entry becomes a nomination.
Two reasons.
First, the regional-language point. Marathi cinema has been producing serious, festival-legible work for two decades while the money and the attention flowed elsewhere. A Marathi debut feature carrying the country’s Oscar hopes is a real marker of where the interesting filmmaking in India currently sits, which is increasingly not in the two or three industries that dominate the headlines.
Second, the Ilaiyaraaja factor. A composer with a five-decade catalogue attaching himself to a first-time director’s folk musical is the kind of cross-industry move that does not happen by accident. It gives the film a name that voters in Los Angeles might actually recognise.
And there is a third, quieter thing. A Kannada filmmaker chaired the jury that sent a Marathi film to the Oscars over a Hindi blockbuster. That is a fairly good snapshot of how Indian cinema’s centre of gravity has moved.
Being India’s entry is not the same as being nominated. The entry goes into a pool of roughly 85 to 90 country submissions, gets voted onto a shortlist of 15, and only then competes for five nomination slots. Films that make it through almost always have a distributor running an actual campaign, with screenings, press and a publicist.
That is the gap India has historically failed to close. The film gets picked in September, the news cycle moves on by October, and by January nobody in Los Angeles has seen it. The re-release plan reported for Gondhal suggests somebody is thinking about this. Whether it is backed with money is the question to watch over the next four months.
BENGALURU BAATH TAKE
We love this pick, and we are also bracing for the part where India forgets about it by December. A debut director, a folk form most of the country could not describe, and Ilaiyaraaja on score is a far more distinctive package than another big-budget entry that Academy voters would file under action movie. But an Oscar entry is not a prize, it is an invitation to spend money. The last decade is full of Indian entries that were announced loudly and then campaigned quietly, which is to say not at all. Watch for a US distributor announcement. That is the moment this either becomes a real run or becomes a very good film with a nice line on its poster.
