A documentary on rural mothers fighting for their daughters’ education has moved from villages in Bihar to the international stage, being featured at the Cannes Lions ERA Programme and the final round for the ABBY Awards in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) category.
The eight-minute long short film, titled Mothers of Courage, produced by Butterfly Effect Media, was recently named Best Inspirational Film at the 2026 Los Angeles Film Awards (LAFA).
“Winning this award affirmed that stories rooted in rural India and women’s everyday realities still matter globally,” said Vandana R, the film's director. “More than awards, this recognition gives visibility to voices and struggles that are often reduced to statistics.”
The documentary follows the lives of first-generation literate mothers in Bihar who participate in ‘Shiksha Chaupals’. These are informal community circles held in goat sheds, front yards, and government verandahs. In these circles, mothers discuss the barriers keeping their daughters out of school, such as a lack of toilets, the need for domestic labour, and the pressure of early marriage.
A central feature of these gatherings is a public oath. To date, over 8 lakh women across 16 districts have publicly sworn to keep their daughters in school at least until Class 12 and to ensure they do not marry before the age of 18.
To capture the raw reality of Bihar’s villages, the crew lived alongside the subjects, sharing meals and travelling with the women.
“We simply stayed with them—travelling with the women, sharing meals, waking up in their villages, spending time with them beyond the camera. Over time, the camera almost disappeared. Conversations around caste, poverty, domestic violence, and girls dropping out of school emerged naturally because nobody was directing them,” Vandana said.
The film is a window into Shikshagraha, a broader people's movement founded by the Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives in partnership with organisations such as Mantra4Change and ShikshaLokam. The movement was launched after activists noticed a high dropout rate among girls in Bihar that local authorities could not easily explain.
"It's not an organisation headed by anybody," said Khushboo Awasthi, co-founder of ShikshaLokam. "It's something that anybody can join and make a change happen on a bigger scale." Shikshagraha aims to improve 10 lakh public schools across India by 2030.
The movement has faced significant social backlash. Activists going village-to-village to organise these chaupals were met with verbal abuse and villagers wielding sticks, fearing the movement would disrupt traditional social structures.
Despite this, the movement is working to erase the stigma that government schools are only for those with no other options.
The team also plans to expand the project. “We now want to continue documenting these women and build a longer feature-length documentary because there are so many silences, stories, and moments that the short film could not fully hold,” said Vandana.
This article was written by a student interning with TNM.