Vivek Das Chaudhary’s debut feature film Toaster has topped Netflix’s Global Top 10 Non-English Films chart, part of a wide range of Indian titles (some of them by debuts and early-career directors) that have been piling up on the list in recent weeks. This is the latest evidence that the platform’s long-term strategy of supporting emerging Indian filmmakers is paying dividends far beyond the subcontinent.
Produced by actor Rajkummar Rao and creative partner Patralekar under the newly launched KAMPA Films banner, the dark comedy is director Anubhuti Kashyap’s second film to top the non-English charts and joins ‘Accused’, which reached the top 10 in 74 countries, marking the platform’s widest reach ever for an Indian film, and ‘Made in Korea’, Netflix’s first Tamil film to be shot in South Korea. Ranked in the global top 10 for consecutive weeks.
For Ruchiaa Kapoor Sheikh, director of original films at Netflix India, this integration is a direct result of how the team approaches creative partnerships. “The more authentic they are, the more local they are. We’ve actually seen them break out and become much more global,” she told Variety. “I never wake up in the morning and say, ‘This is a global title.'” She explains that her philosophy is to support filmmakers with unique, deeply rooted beliefs and trust that the work will take its own course.
数字はこのアプローチを裏付けています。 From 2024 to 2025, an Indian movie or series will appear in Netflix’s global top 10 every week, with the amount of Indian titles included in that list increasing sixfold since the reporting began in July 2021. In 2025 alone, more than 3.4 billion hours of Indian content on the platform will be watched across 75 countries, which equates to approximately 65 million hours per week. More than 70% of global Netflix viewing is done with subtitles or dubbing, according to Kapur Shaikh, and Indian productions are finding audiences in both large and small-diaspora markets alike, from Argentina and Egypt to South Korea, Morocco, Bolivia and Taiwan.
‘Toaster’, which premiered on the platform on April 15th, is Das Chaudhary’s first feature film and KAMPA’s debut film. The film is set in Mumbai and is built around the protagonist, a miser who finds himself in an increasingly absurd situation. Rao, who also stars in the film, said the project came to him and Patralekar as a one-page proposal that they spent months developing before taking it to Netflix. “There’s no formula to it,” he told Variety. “I want to create something that I’m really excited about.”
The title itself was not a development coincidence, but a deliberate choice. “If you’re sitting in Japan, the US, the UK, Thailand or India, you know what a toaster is,” he says. That strangeness was the point, he reasoned. It’s quirky enough to encourage clicks, yet simple enough to move anywhere.
Patralekar, who took the lead as hands-on producer while Rao focused on acting, is at the heart of KAMPA’s long-term ambition to tell stories on tightly controlled budgets, with a particular focus on empowering new directors and screenwriters. For Das Chaudhary, his experience with his first feature film was different from what he expected from a major platform. “What I appreciated most was the trust they had in the filmmaker’s vision and not only supporting it, but helping it grow,” he told Variety.
「告発」は別のルートでスクリーンに登場しました。 The film’s concept, a thriller centered on a lesbian couple with themes of sexual harassment and prejudice, was conceived within Netflix India’s creative team, who then sought out Kashyap to handle the dramatic material empathetically. “They approached me because they were looking for a female director,” Kashyap told Variety. After joining, she steered the project towards a restrained and grounded tone and co-produced it with Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions. “The film’s packaging, which combines thriller and LGBT themes, explains the film’s global reach,” she says.
Kapur Sheikh points out that the shift to new voices was intentional from the beginning, with a track record that spans years and genres. The platform has been created by Honey Trehan (‘Raat Akeli Hai’), Aditya Nimbalkar (‘Sector 36’), Arjun Varaine Singh (‘Ko Gaye Hum Kahan’), Vivek Soni (‘ He has worked with first-time and second-time directors such as ‘Meenakshi Sundareshwar’, ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’) and Yashowardhan Mishra, whose directorial debut was ‘Catalunya Jackfruit Mystery’. Netflixのインド映画がインド国立映画賞の最優秀ヒンディー語映画賞を受賞。 She says the process now extends beyond Mumbai, from screenwriters to directors, with regional talent moving across languages. “The hunger that comes from new voices becomes critical to keeping the flywheel moving,” she says.
On the Tamil side, “Made in Korea” star Priyanka Mohan, whose international profile has increased significantly due to the film’s chart success, says it took her time to absorb the magnitude of the response. “I continue to see how simple Tamil stories resonate with audiences around the world,” she told Variety.
The current chart performance, which also includes “Border 2” and “Dhulandhar” in the list of Indian titles in recent weeks, reflects a deliberate balance between emerging and established voices, with the ratio changing over time, as explained by Kapur Sheikh. Along with local filmmakers tapping into the wider market, “we’re going to see a lot of interesting writers move into directing,” she says. The goal in her framework is fluidity in the creative ecosystem enough to accommodate both first-time directors and returning established authors, and the current Global Top 10 sees that balance in real time.
