When Bina Bhattacharya set out to make her first feature film, she wasn’t trying to shock audiences. She was trying to tell the truth as she saw it.
“I wanted to make a film about how I see the world,” Bhattacharya tells The Indian Sun from her Sydney home. “Middle Australia has changed, but our cinema hasn’t really caught up.”
That truth arrives this weekend. Her debut, From All Sides, centres on Anoushka and Pascal, a married, multiracial bisexual couple in Western Sydney raising two teenage children while navigating an open relationship. Here, sex is part of the story, but so are school runs, work pressures, microaggressions and the emotional labour of modern family life. It will screen at The Sun Theatre in Yaraville ahead of a wider cinema run and an SBS broadcast later in 2026.
The film is a project born from a long-simmering personal frustration. “At the time I was writing, I was getting older and I had a lot of rage,” Bhattacharya admits. “About racism, condescension, not being valued.”
Her own story is one of navigating different worlds: her father is Bengali, from Kolkata; her mother is white, from Adelaide. She grew up in Australia in the 1990s, where she saw little of herself on screen.
“There was no Indian representation on TV.” Her connection to that culture came from home. “My father loved movies. I grew up watching Satyajit Ray films. I also loved popular Indian cinema. I can sing all the songs from Disco Dancer.”
But the road to making her film was long. After graduating from film school in 2007, she faced years of closed doors. “I’m realising now that there was a lot of unconscious bias,” she reflects. “An unwillingness to hire someone who looked or sounded a little bit different.”
A decade in the public service and a stint in London followed. It wasn’t until she returned to Australia in 2015, and later wrote for the anthology film Here Out West, that her path to directing cleared.
From All Sides channels that journey. Bhattacharya grew frustrated with how racism and South Asian characters are typically portrayed. “We always see the same version – someone loud, someone overt,” she says. “What I experienced was more subtle: people talking down to you, not valuing your contributions.”
That constant uncertainty – Was that racism, or am I imagining it? – is what she wanted to capture. In the film, pressure comes from all directions: a dismissive boss, tense in-law dynamics, competitive dance parents, and the endless lift of motherhood.
The open relationship, she insists, is not the central conflict. “It’s just one part of her (protagonist Anouska) life,” she says. “The stress mostly comes from outside.”
Hence the title. “When you’re a woman with a family, you get it from all sides.”
The film is quietly landmark in what it chooses not to do. It is one of the rare Australian films to explore bisexuality and polyamory without leaning on tropes of jealousy or moral panic. Instead, the relationship is treated as negotiated, imperfect, and lived-in – neither glamourised nor condemned.
It is also trailblazing in representation. At its centre is a middle-aged Indian-Australian woman, played by Monique Kalmar – a demographic almost never positioned as the emotional or sexual core of an Australian feature. “It’s always sexless, always self-deprecating,” Bhattacharya says of common South Asian portrayals. “It’s never cool, smart, sophisticated people who have their lives together.”
Some viewers, she notes, find Anoushka “too brassy” or “too outspoken.” “But the compass is very different for people of colour,” she adds. “If we transgress, we’re punished more.”
The film also weaves in classical Indian dance, a deliberate choice that draws a sharp contrast in cultural value and recognition. Bhattacharya was inspired by the politics of dance itself.
“I was very nervous about this, but I just love Indian classical dance,” she admits. “I was very interested in the politics of it. I grew up with a white mother who loves classical music, and I love ballet, too. But we have whole ballet companies in Australia that are very posh. They get a big theatre, people pay lots of money, and they have lots of patronage. And then we also have fabulous Bharatanatyam dancers who are rehearsing in garages.”
Even before completion, From All Sides gained international attention. In 2024, it was selected for Queer Screen’s “Goes to Cannes” showcase, screening as a work in progress.
Bhattacharya bristles at the idea that her work is “niche.” “There are over a billion Indians. South Asian stories are global. What’s niche is pretending Australia still looks the way it did 50 years ago.”
She hopes the film sparks conversations about family, sexuality, parenting, and the quiet pressures women carry. “For all their flaws,” she says, “this family actually works.”
Of course, she was nervous about her community’s reaction to the film’s frankness, but one response stayed with her: “An older Bengali uncle told me, ‘They have to learn.’”
Above all, she wants viewers to question the model minority myth. “Why do people of colour have to behave perfectly?” she asks. “Why can’t we be flawed? Angry? Messy?”
From All Sides will screen at The Sun Theatre, Yarraville, with a Q&A on Friday, 30 January 2026
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