"Working Girls" Film Screening and Q&A with Director Paromita Vohra

Join us at Public Trust for "Working Girls", a film screening and conversation on Monday, March 2, 2026 from 5:30pm-8:30pm about the invisible lives of women in India whose labor sustains their society. Following the screening, director Paromita Vohra will engage in conversation with scholar Bakirathi Mani.

Presented by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the University of Pennsylvania in partnership with Public Trust and additional support from the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania.

This screening is a part of The Philly Cinematheque, 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.

Register via Eventbrite

About the Film

Working Girls (2025), directed by Paromita Vohra, is a vibrant, thought-provoking documentary that journeys across India to explore the often unseen worlds of women’s labor. From the bustling streets of Kolkata, Pune, and Mumbai to the sloping hills of Shillong, the temple town of Madurai, the fields of Latur, and cities including Thiruvananthapuram and Hyderabad, the film traces a wide social and geographic landscape. Through the lives of domestic workers, dancers, mothers, farmers, ASHA workers, surrogates, sex workers, union leaders, and grassroots organizers, it reveals the many forms of work that remain invisible yet are essential to everyday life.

Blending sharp wit, rich music, and a deep engagement with the legal and historical forces shaping women’s lives, Working Girls challenges conventional ideas about what counts as work and whose labor is valued. The film brings humor and clarity to questions of gender, power, and visibility, while foregrounding the systems that structure care, reproduction, and survival. Directed by feminist filmmaker Paromita Vohra and created in collaboration with the Laws of Social Reproduction project, the documentary offers an urgent yet joyful portrait of resistance, resilience, and everyday survival—and invites audiences to rethink not only how we understand labor, but who is recognized as a worker.

About the Speakers

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and committed antakshari player whose truth-telling, kinetic, and sensuous films, online videos, art installations and television programming explore feminism, gender, desire, urban life and popular culture. She is the director of several documentaries including Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra?, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Partners in Crime and most recently Working Girls. She has written the film Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters, the comic Priya’s Mirror, the play Ishqiya Dharavi Ishtyle and a weekly newspaper column Paronormal Activity, which she wrote for 15 years. In 2015 she founded Agents of Ishq, a digital platform which has transformed conversations on sex, love, and desire in India.

Bakirathi Mani is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Asian American Studies Program. Mani is also a curator of South Asian diasporic visual cultures, and the author of Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America, and Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America.