Gondhal Is India's Oscar Entry, and It Is Getting a Second Release in Seven Languages on November 13

Photo: Maheshbarate07, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Gondhal came and went in November 2025. It was a Marathi thriller that nobody outside Maharashtra saw, it lost money, and that should have been that. Then in September the Film Federation of India picked it from thirty-three contenders as the country's submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars, and this week the makers released a global trailer and announced a re-release in seven languages on November 13.

Photo: Dani Charles Silverscreen Media Inc., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The film is directed by Santosh Davakhar and set around a gondhal, the folk ritual performance in honour of the goddess that is part of weddings and festivals in rural Maharashtra. Ishita Deshmukh plays Suman, a young wife trapped in a marriage that is slowly suffocating her, and Kishor Kadam, Yogesh Sohoni and Nishad Bhoir are around her. Ilaiyaraaja did the score, which on its own is a reason to see it on a big screen.

Photo: Deepak Bansi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The trailer is tense and strange in a good way. It is a thriller that uses a religious ceremony as the stage for something unspoken in a family, and the folk music under it turns the whole thing into a slow drumbeat. I can see why a selection jury picked it. I can also see why audiences skipped it last year, because it is not an easy sell in two minutes.

Photo: Los Angeles Times, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The re-release is in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and English, across India, the US, the UK, Europe, Australia, Dubai and Africa. The makers say it is the first time a Marathi film has been re-released that widely, and they are plainly aiming at the Academy voters who need to see it in a cinema before the shortlist in December.

Photo: Pinakpani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

India's entries have had a rough decade at the Oscars, and a film that already failed at home is an unusual pick. Will you give it a look in November, or do you wait for the shortlist to tell you whether it mattered?