Vague Visages’ Herland review contains minor spoilers. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Kallol Mukherjee’s Herland, a documentary set in rural Rajasthan, begins with something that might seem almost too modest to constitute a political struggle: the right to work for women. Yet in the village where the female protagonists live, even this elementary demand requires them to challenge an elaborate social order in which mobility, employment and public visibility have long been treated as male privileges. Over roughly 100 minutes, Mukherjee show how courage accumulates — hesitantly, incrementally, almost imperceptibly — until what initially appears to be an individual assertion becomes a collective one.

The narrative revolves around a young married woman, Bhagyashree, who is from Goojarpur village in Rajasthan. She decides to join Ibtida, an NGO working to bring the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to her village. The government program is intended to provide guaranteed employment to rural households, yet the bureaucratic promise of a few hundred rupees for a day’s work soon reveals itself to be a mammoth task. Bhagyashree and the other women must navigate entrenched systems, indifference and resistance as their demand for employment gradually expands into a larger struggle for dignity and agency.

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The women in Herland don’t merely ask for wages. They negotiate their right to occupy the public sphere, to have their labor acknowledged and their presence counted. Mukherjee never feels the need to articulate this larger distinction; instead, he lets it gradually emerge through Bhagyashree’s character arc. At the beginning, she covers her face in the presence of others, observing a convention that seems less like a personal choice than a reflex acquired through generations. Later, Bhagyashree and other women confront the village headman, demanding that he provide them with work. When their demands are ignored, she travels to the district magistrate’s office. Here, courage is not a personality trait that suddenly reveals itself but rather something learned through repeated acts of refusal and tentative defiance. Such incrementalism gives the documentary its unusual tenderness. What may look like a minor step from a distance can, within the world the director observes, be a seismic leap. Sometimes, social transformation begins simply with a woman uncovering her face, walking into a government office, refusing to let someone else answer for her, demanding an answer and insisting that her labor has value.

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Herland remains resolutely rural, avoiding the reassuring counter-image of a free-spirited urban India. Instead, it keeps returning to the material conditions that complicate the women’s struggle. Village drains go uncleaned, there is no proper cremation ground and even drinking water is scarce. The state appears simultaneously omnipresent and absent. Government schemes exist on paper and officials occupy offices, yet the most basic needs remain unresolved. Even MGNREGA, conceived as a guarantee of rural employment, becomes another source of frustration. The women may claim their right to work but securing that entitlement in practice proves far more difficult. The village council is a male domain and the women’s presence there is itself disruptive. Yet when they enter government offices, officials often prefer to address their husbands instead of them. The right to work, then, extends far beyond employment, as it means negotiating the terms on which these women are permitted to participate in public life. This is where Anita and Sahab Singh, the NGO’s representatives, assume an important role. They guide the women as they learn to speak for themselves, assert their rights and develop a shared sense of solidarity.

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Mukherjee is careful, however, not to flatten the men into a single category of patriarchal antagonists. Some accept the social roles assigned to them without much apparent self-examination, while others support their wives. One husband is even willing to give up an opportunity for a better job so that his wife can continue working with the NGO. Such moments complicate the film’s politics without weakening them. Patriarchy, Herland recognizes, is not sustained by a cast of uniformly malicious men but by habits, expectations and arrangements passed almost seamlessly from one generation to another. It resides not only in institutions, but also in the routines of everyday life. Therefore, the possibility of change cannot be reduced to replacing one group of people with another. It involves altering the terms through which everyone understands their place.

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Yash Dubey’s cinematography contributes to this observational quality. He follows the women closely when the moment calls for proximity but also knows when to maintain a respectful distance. Viewers remain near enough to register hesitation, amusement, irritation and exhaustion, while the perceptive framing allows the larger social space to remain visible. Sanchay Bose’s editing keeps Herland moving at a brisk pace without reducing its accumulation of small encounters to mere plot points. Himang Pali’s sound design preserves the texture of natural conversation and the surrounding ambience, while Nishant Ramteke’s score gives the film an understated liveliness. The music does not instruct audiences when to feel triumphant; rather, it remains attuned to the gradual shifts taking place within the women’s lives.

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Herland is less about emancipation achieved than emancipation practiced. Its women do not overthrow the stifling structures. Through small, sometimes precarious acts, they gradually learn to push against them. The forces Bhagyashree and the other women confront did not begin with their struggle; they are inherited constraints, deeply embedded in the world around them. Their pursuit of justice, therefore, becomes an act of resistance against a system that has rarely been expected to yield. But every refusal to accept the terms imposed upon them creates a possibility for those who follow, and these hard-won victories may yet become the beginnings of something larger.

Herland will have its world premiere on September 9, 2026 at the Moscow International Documentary Film Festival DOKer, where it has been selected for the Main Competition.

Dipankar Sarkar (@Dipankar_Tezpur) is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic based in India. As a freelancer, he regularly contributes to various Indian publications on cinema-related topics.

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