The moon shone the brightest on Regal Cinema on Tuesday night (April 28, 2026) as more than a thousand people turned up to watch a one-of-its-kind collaborative documentary-feature, Mast Mahila Mandali (Cool Ladies Club) directed by a group of ten working-class women living in Mumbai’s Chembur. Their vibrant dreams, desires and aspirations find a tender release as they step up to tell their own stories with their own inimitable flair, inventing an intimate gaze backed by love and a reassuring aesthetic build on friendship. In their playful hands, the smartphone camera is a tool of empathy, refusing to reduce their lives to a statistic, turning the cramped spaces between their homes into a playground of possibilities.

One among them, Nazneen Siddiqui, appears early on in the film, as she is asked to talk of her turbulent past when she is more interested to romanticise the beauty of monsoon. It is an unassuming moment which underlines how popular culture eyes the oppressed through the lens of extreme suffering. Nazneen elaborated on why she refused to speak about her sorrows in that scene during the hospitable post-screening conversation.