Looking back on the films that shaped her career, Shabana Azmi told at MBIFL 2026 audience that moving between parallel and mainstream cinema was never a strategic choice for her. It was a natural extension of learning how to adapt to different cinematic languages. She was in conversation with Vishal Menon at the session titled 'Of Fire and Ice'.

My first film 'Ánkur'

“If Ankur hadn’t been my first film, my life would have been very different,” Azmi said.
Her debut, Ankur, was anything but an easy entry. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and immediately positioned her within India’s parallel cinema movement. Had she begun in mainstream cinema, she believes her competition would have been with actors like Rekha and Hema Malini. Ankur gave her a different axis altogether- one that shaped the roles she was offered and the expectations attached to her.

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Mainstream cinema came later. “I wanted to cater to a bigger audience,” she said, quick to add that the artistic commitment required was no less demanding. “Even in mainstream cinema, I have to give 100 per cent. I have to shed my inhibitions.” In contrast, she said she is in complete awe of the younger generation of actors, who show little inhibition even in their debut roles.
'Hello, this is not your art film'

She recalled director Manmohan Desai offering a blunt reminder in her early days on set: “Hello, this is not your art film. Say your dialogues fast.” Decades later, the same lesson returned in a different register. While filming Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Azmi questioned the excess — the long hair, the fish curry, the kitchen drama and the practical lack of logic in the scenario. Karan Johar’s response, she said, was cheerful and decisive: “In my films, everything goes. Just do it.”

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Each cinematic universe has its own grammar, she said, its own logic and rhythm. The actor’s task is not to resist that grammar, but to belong to it fully — whether it is Amar Akbar Anthony or an intimate realist drama.

That ability to move between worlds, she suggested, came not from calculation, but from the trust in craft.