Parched

Parched follows four women living in a village in northwestern India, where long-standing customs dictate that girls are married off young and wives are expected to obey their husbands without complaint. Rani, Lajjo, Champa and Bijli each face their own struggles within this setting, from unhappy marriages to limits placed on their independence. Drawing on their friendship, they begin to push back against the expectations binding them, while still dreaming of love and of lives beyond the village.

The film is a drama directed by Leena Yadav, who also wrote the screenplay and is credited as the first international production in her career. It was produced by Ajay Devgn, Aseem Bajaj and Gulab Singh Tanwar, with Russell Carpenter as cinematographer, and stars Radhika Apte, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Sayani Gupta and Surveen Chawla, alongside Adil Hussain and Sumeet Vyas. Made on a budget of about 3 million US dollars, it was released in 2015 and runs 116 minutes.

Audience response has been solid: on IMDb, the film holds 7.5 out of 10 from roughly 6,500 votes, while on TMDB its rating is 7.3 out of 10 from around 101 votes. The similarity between the two scores suggests a consistently favourable reaction across both platforms, though the much larger IMDb sample gives that rating greater weight.