OUR PRACTICE
Star Hopper Studio is an award-winning queer and trans-led film production house and creative studio from India. We work across fiction, documentary, and hybrid moving image forms, including immersive and interactive work.
The studio has developed its practice over years of working across independent film, commissioned projects, and long-form, research-led collaborations.
We make films and cultural projects with a feeling for texture, rhythm, and consequence. Our practice comes from lived experience, close collaboration, and long attention to what gets funded, commissioned, circulated, and remembered. This attention is shaped by working within uneven infrastructures, informal economies, and contested cultural spaces.
We pay close attention to rhythm, proximity, and the ethics of looking, particularly in contexts shaped by uneven power and access.
WHAT WE MAKE
We develop and produce independent films, documentaries, and hybrid works, and we collaborate on commissions for brands, institutions, and cultural organisations. We move between formats without treating form as a hierarchy. A short film can hold as much complexity as a feature, a campaign film can carry real cultural weight, and an interactive work can be cinema by other means.
Our process begins early. We work from concept and story architecture through production and post, staying close to the work until it knows what it wants to be. Projects often begin with extended periods of research, conversation, and location-based engagement before taking form on screen. Much of the work develops through extended conversation and time spent in specific locations.
POSITION
We are trans-led. That is not a label added at the end of a pitch deck. It shapes how we build teams, how we hold collaboration, and how decisions are made in rooms where power usually gathers elsewhere.
We are attentive to authorship. Who gets to direct. Who gets to produce. Who gets to be hired repeatedly. Who is trusted with scale. Who is reduced to a quote, a case study, a grant category, a festival panel.
We work with a trans-feminist ethic that stays practical. It shows up in labour, credit, consent, casting, location choices, and the everyday production culture a set normalises. This ethic becomes visible through how the work is made.
WHAT WE REFUSE
We do not frame trans life as a problem to be interpreted, and we do not make work to satisfy diversity optics. We are not an outreach programme. We are not an inclusion unit.
We are a studio practice, committed to craft and to the conditions that allow craft to exist. We are interested in work that can be sustained over time. This includes staying with difficulty, slowness, and partial visibility.
CONTEXT
Within Indian cinema, visibility often settles around a narrow idea of queerness shaped by class, language, access, and cultural capital. What falls outside this frame is frequently left unseen, especially trans, gender-nonconforming, intersex, and non-binary lives, and work that does not seek validation through legibility.
We are interested in building work that can survive outside those circuits, and still reach people. Work that can move across contexts without losing its specificity. Work that remains answerable to where it comes from.
OUR ECOSYSTEM
Our curatorial and publishing work lives through Underground Film Observatory, where we write about radical and independent cinema across regions, with South Asia as an anchor and not a boundary.
Our publishing imprint Riot Ink Press holds print and experimental forms that sit alongside film practice. These practices continue to shape how the studio thinks, edits, and sustains its work.