Community Screening of Working Girls (Paromita Vohra, 2025)
Anna Murphy and Gabriela Bellot[1]
doi: https://doi.org/10.58117/qanv-wq73
On March 2, 2025, amid enduring global crises, a moment of reprieve and resistance occurred. This moment took the form of a public screening and discussion of Paromita Vohra’s newest film, Working Girls, at the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Public Trust.
Vohra — a feminist filmmaker and pioneer of the Agents of Ishq, an educational sexual wellness website — was in attendance to situate the film within her documentary repertoire, including the critically acclaimed 2002 feature Unlimited Girls. Her latest work offers a complex portrait of women across different sites in India who partake in care work and earn income from employment such as surrogacy, union organising, sex work, dance, and farming. Through vibrant visuals, comedic yet informative animations, and the personal narration of the film’s director, this 2025 documentary continues to push the gendered and colonial boundaries of how we value labor.
This particular screening bloomed out of the partnership between the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication, the Center for Advanced Studies in India, and the Philadelphia Cinematheque. The Cinematheque, co-led by the authors of this review, is a new initiative housed in the Annenberg School for Communication. It brings a community-focused approach to an eclectic program of global film and television screenings. In doing so, it functions as both an informal gathering place and an intentional intervention to further embed cinema—as a modality, a space, and a method—in communications scholarship.
Following the screening, Paromita Vohra answered questions and engaged in a thoughtful conversation with the University of Pennsylvania’s Presidential Compact Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Dr. Bakirathi Mani. Vohra and Bakirathi, alongside a jam-packed audience, also delved into her creative process and how Paromita’s voice and interests have evolved over her lengthy career.
Throughout Working Girls, the audience is given an intimate insight into the daily lives of memorable women across the region, interrogating who gets to be seen as a worker. One analysis of the film might place it within the tradition of feminist autonomous Marxists like Silvia Federici (1975), noting the systematic ways in which women’s reproductive and social labour have been excluded from understandings of global capitalist economies in scholarly and everyday circles alike.
Another understanding might highlight the specific history of British colonialism in India and the ways many of the featured forms of work were methodically rendered taboo or deprived of material value—something Vohra brilliantly highlights in the film. Resonances of the work of legal scholar Dr. Prabha Kotiswaran (2014), principal investigator of the Laws of Social Reproduction Project, of which the film is part, extend to the tensions of regulation and exclusion explored in the film. All reactions speak to Paromita’s remarkable ability to interweave varied and complex stories of often-controversial work to craft a visual journey across India that is funny, radical, and enjoyable to watch all at the same time.
This film, zany yet seriously rooted in a feminist and decolonial project, fits within Paromita’s legacy of a continued political and personal investment in highlighting the stories of those who are often exoticised, excluded, or exploited.
References
- Federici, Silvia & London Wages for Housework Committee. (1975). Wages against housework by Silvia Federici. Bristol: Falling Wall Press [for] the Power of Women Collective
- Kotiswaran, Prabha. (2014). Beyond the allures of criminalization: rethinking the regulation of sex work in India. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 14(5), 565-579.
Notes
University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication. The authors co-lead the Philadelphia Cinematheque. You may reach them on Instagram @phillycinematheque