What it leaves unsaid is the high percentage of unreported cases, though it does hint at the botched investigations and the lengthy trials, which in turn result in inadequate prison terms handed to the criminals. Three decades later, Raje is revisiting some of those ideas in a different world with Firebrand - Netflix's first original Marathi film, produced by Priyanka Chopra, out now - which follows a divorce lawyer called Sunanda Raut (Usha Jadhav, from Dhag) and is cloaked under a narrative that tackles relevant subject matter: sexual assault and domestic abuse.Ĭiting official statistics, Firebrand lays bare the India of today, a country of 1.3 billion people where a woman is raped every 20 minutes. It was proudly feminist and hence truly ahead of its time. In the late eighties, while navigating her divorce with her fellow filmmaker husband, writer-director Aruna Raje delivered Rihaee - starring Hema Malini and Vinod Khanna - a subversive film that unapologetically explored the sexual needs and frustrations of married women in rural corners of India.