Stars of Tomorrow 2025: Shalini Adnani (writer/director)

Earlier this year, writer/director Shalini Adnani wrapped a 28-day shoot in Maharashtra, India on her BFI and Film4-backed untitled feature debut – an exploration of truth and morality in an age of misinformation, produced by Sara Bonakdar of Fifth Mirror Pictures and sold by Global Constellation. She describes the shoot as “the most fulfilling experience of my life”.

Adnani has many cultures to draw on for influence, as a Chile-born, New York-educated, south London-based filmmaker of Sindhi Indian descent. But possibly the most consistent theme running through her projects came from working with an initiative that supports prisoners’ education, while completing a BA at New York’s Bard College from 2007-11. “Entrapment” and “claustrophobia” are themes she says came up in her conversations with prisoners and are echoed in her work.

After Bard, she pursued journalism, returned to Chile and started working in the art department of 2011 TV drama The Archives Of The Cardinal, which piqued her interest in narrative filmmaking. To gain technical experience, Adnani headed to London Film School for its filmmaking MA, graduating in 2018. She is also a Berlinale Talents alumnus, with her Film4-backed short White Ant, and is currently developing her UK-set second feature Hold Still (a “Victorian psychosexual, colonial, anthropological kind of film”).

Adnani is open to collaboration, writing for different directors and directing for different writers, but feels she always has a particular stamp: “There’s something a little more mystical and transcendental to my work.”

Contact: Liam Francis Quigley, Entertainment 360

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