The driving force behind In the Ring is to connect distinctive stories from India to global audiences, while staying firmly rooted in our home market. We aim to showcase the region’s rich culture and talent through a diverse range of films — from independent gems to box-office successes. Using boxing as a theme, In the Ring explores universal themes of identity, family, the tension between dreams and cultural or gender boundaries, and the quiet rebellions that shape a person’s life. It does so without losing its entertainment value or becoming preachy. Although deeply rooted in Kolkata’s cultural fabric, the story speaks to every girl in the world — her struggles, her aspirations, and her fight to claim her space.
Visually, the film is set in Kolkata — a city caught in a time warp, where memories and unfulfilled desires drift through streets still enamoured with a colonial past. Over this lies Tagore’s poetic and cultural legacy, a quiet layer of resistance and yearning. The music reflects this duality: the aching spiritual longing of the Bauls, mixed with the instinctive defiance of Kazi Nazrul Islam, and the audacious spirit of Subhash Chandra Bose — who challenged Gandhi’s path of non-violence with an armed struggle against British rule.
Our market expertise ensures that the stories we curate resonate worldwide. The primary audience for In the Ring includes filmgoers from the Indian subcontinent — in India and across the diaspora — as well as audiences in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Beyond that, it will connect with international viewers who were moved by films like Million Dollar Baby, Fire Inside, Girlfight, and The Boxing Girls of Kabul.
In The Ring, a psychological thriller, is the story of a young boxer, Shama, whose mother abandoned her when she only a few days old. Fighting is all she knows since she was a baby, and dreams of winning the National Boxing Championship to escape a life of poverty and despair. So when her uncle arrives from a faraway village and threatens her dream of freedom, she must invent a new strategy to win, by hook or by crook to fulfill her dream. The central conflict is between the external world of the story, set in a real location, Khidirpur, Kolkata, with its rigid rules about the place of women in society, and the internal world of a young girls’ imagination in which she does win and become a champion. The discrepancy between these two worlds leads the protagonist to find the truth about her beginnings and become whole. Any kind of transformation requires the breaking of old moulds. In The Ring explores violence literally and metaphorically – the ritualized violence within the ring where the fight is one-on-one between equally matched opponents; the violence of neglect, and most importantly the violence of class and gender hierarchies, the insidious threat of which dominates the psyche of all women.
The various strategies different characters employ to navigate it, is the story of In The Ring. Shama’s disappeared mother transcends it with her art and poetry, her aunt Zeenat succumbs to it, her neighbour Tahira Apa plays to power, and Shama takes the bull by the horn and fights it through her boxing. Learning to fight transforms her even though the code of honour in the ring is different from the outside world. In the story In The Ring, the characters are constantly in motion to break the moulds prescribed for them and refuse to be victims of their circumstances. Having made the documentary Burqa Boxers on the same subject, my familiarity with the milieu gives me confidence to tell the fiction story In The Ring with authenticity and artistic conviction.
