Gully Boy

Gully Boy is a "rags to riches" story, but Zoya Akhtar refuses to tell it that way. Murad (Ranveer Singh) is a young Muslim man from Dharavi, Mumbai's sprawling slum, who discovers hip-hop as a way to narrate his life. His verses — written by real Mumbai rappers Divine and Naezy, whose lives inspired the film — are not fantasies of wealth but dispatches from a world of domestic violence, economic precarity, and the casual Islamophobia of "respectable" India.

Akhtar's triumph is in making a film that is simultaneously a mainstream musical and a document of class. The rap battles in the Dharavi chawls are electrifying — Singh trained for months with real rappers — but the film's most radical moments are quiet. Murad's mother, who has spent her life accepting abuse as "normal," watching her son perform on stage and understanding, for the first time, that her story is worth telling too.

India submitted Gully Boy to the Oscars. It didn't make the shortlist, but the soundtrack became the most-streamed Indian album on Spotify. The film sparked a national conversation about who gets to make art and whose stories get to be told.