Challenging the status quo | Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari's 'System'
Four years after her last directorial venture, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari returns with 'System', an intense courtroom drama on Amazon Prime
Sometimes, all it takes is a loss for a professional reset. In filmmaker Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s case, her mother’s passing in 2024 led her to re-evaluate her role as a storyteller. There was a pause, lots of travel and doing your thing, which was “everything except making movies”. “I was fed up at the way people looked at films and things worked [in the industry],” she says. The box office failure of Panga (2020) and the tepid response to her maiden web series, Faadu (2022), caused introspection. “I was shattered. I felt we need to celebrate stories, we cannot be celebrating individuals.” But rise from the ashes she did.
Sometimes, all it takes is a loss for a professional reset. In filmmaker Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s case, her mother’s passing in 2024 led her to re-evaluate her role as a storyteller. There was a pause, lots of travel and doing your thing, which was “everything except making movies”. “I was fed up at the way people looked at films and things worked [in the industry],” she says. The box office failure of Panga (2020) and the tepid response to her maiden web series, Faadu (2022), caused introspection. “I was shattered. I felt we need to celebrate stories, we cannot be celebrating individuals.” But rise from the ashes she did.
With the Amazon Prime film System, her first directorial venture in four years, Tiwari feels she has refound her groove. The Harman Baweja and Arun Sukumar-written drama, she felt, “gave me everything: there was female friendship and a socio-economic divide, a courtroom drama and elements of a thriller.” With Sonakshi Sinha as a lawyer from a privileged background who befriends Jyothika’s stenographer and seeks her guidance to win cases, System is novel in viewing legal proceedings through the eyes of a stenographer. Says Tiwari, “Unsung heroes need to be celebrated. They know as much they have been there, done that.”
But she didn’t want to confine the action to a courtroom. “The real power dynamics and emotional quotients are outside it,” she adds. Like her previous movies Nil Battey Sannata and Bareilly Ki Barfi the portraits of the two women stand out here. The film raises issues like patriarchy in rich households, desire, ambition and ethics.
As one of the leading female filmmakers in Bollywood and with a decade in the industry, Tiwari doesn’t concern herself with anyone’s opinions but her own. One in particular she holds firmly: the onus to have gender parity cannot be on women alone. “Male counterparts also have to ensure that a woman’s talent is recognised and more are hired on the basis of it,” she says.
For Tiwari, making System was akin to going back to her beginnings as an independent filmmaker making her debut with Nil Battey Sannata. “It came out very pure. I didn’t have any baggage of what the film’s fate will be. That’s when the best version of yourself emerges when there’s no pressure of a producer or platform.” It’s why she believes System has the chops to click.
