Huma Qureshi Is Building Films Nobody Asked Her to Make
TL;DR: Huma Qureshi arrived at Cannes 2025 not with a film in competition but with a production slate that signals a deliberate shift from actor-for-hire to filmmaker-producer. Her two most significant upcoming projects are the Yash-starrer Toxic and the Mumbai noir Baby Do Die Do, the latter a film she co-produced and stars in as a deaf-mute assassin. Both are expected to release in 2025, with Indian OTT windows likely to follow theatrical runs.
Huma Qureshi walked the Cannes Croisette in May 2025 without a film in competition, and that might be the most interesting thing about where she stands right now.
She was there as a BMW ambassador and as a participant in the Red Sea Film Foundation's Women in Cinema event, drawing filmmakers and talent from India, Africa, and the Arab world. No competition slot. No premiere. No official selection. Yet the conversation she's generating is about a project list that reads like someone who spent the last two years quietly refusing to wait for the phone to ring. Variety reported from the Croisette that Qureshi is sitting on multiple unannounced projects she isn't permitted to discuss until producers move first.
"Tons of things," she told Variety, with what the reporter described as genuine ease.
That's not a marketing line. That's someone who figured out the production side.
What Toxic and Baby Do Die Do Actually Are
Start with the facts, because both projects are distinct enough that conflating them does a disservice to either.
Toxic is a large-scale commercial film starring Yash, the Kannada-language superstar whose KGF: Chapter 2 crossed $130 million at the worldwide box office. Directed by Geethu Mohandas, the film features Qureshi in a character named Elizabeth. A 2025 theatrical window has been widely reported, though no official runtime or release date has been confirmed.
Baby Do Die Do is different:
- Director: Nachiket Samant
- Genre: Mumbai-set noir
- Qureshi's role: Baby Karmakar, a deaf-mute assassin
- Production company: Saleem Siblings (co-produced with her brother, actor Saqib Saleem)
- Planned release: July 2025
- Notable: First feature under the Saleem Siblings banner
To prepare for Baby Karmakar, Qureshi learned sign language. Not a crash course for a few scenes. Enough to carry a central performance built almost entirely without dialogue. That's the kind of commitment that tends to separate a passion project from a studio assignment.
Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker is tracking streaming availability for both titles across regions as release windows are confirmed.
Why Qureshi Is Turning Down the "Impoverished Brown Woman" Role
Here's where the interview gets genuinely interesting.
When discussing her ambitions for international work, Qureshi was direct about the category of role she's done watching get offered to South Asian women in Western productions. "I also don't like playing these kind of impoverished brown woman with a problem, kind of, who needs to be rescued," she told Variety. "We all want to be playing characters that are authentic to us, but also sort of put a certain spotlight on our real experiences and challenges and capabilities."
That's a precise critique of a real and persistent casting pattern. She's not making a vague call for representation. She's naming the archetype and declining it. The characters she's actually chasing, she explained, are what she calls "more territorial agnostic" — projects that don't require her to function as a fixed ethnic signifier within someone else's cultural framework. She also cited Priyanka Chopra Jonas as evidence that genuine cross-border commercial weight is achievable, not aspirational.
That's a measured read of the market, not a wishful one.
Maharani, Her Biggest Show, and Where Indian Audiences Actually Are
For Indian audiences, Qureshi isn't an emerging name. She's been working steadily since Anurag Kashyap's Gangs of Wasseypur premiered at Cannes 2012 — that's 13 years of output across commercial releases, streaming originals, and international festival selections.
The most relevant current property for Indian streaming audiences is Maharani, the SonyLIV political drama in which Qureshi plays a semi-literate rural woman who becomes a state chief minister. The show is now in its fifth season, and Qureshi's claim that it's "arguably India's biggest show that people watch" isn't entirely self-serving — SonyLIV reported significant viewership for earlier seasons, though the platform hasn't released per-season figures publicly. (The gap between actual viewership and English-language press coverage is a structural issue: a vernacular-coded political drama about a woman most urban commentators couldn't easily categorize just wasn't going to get column inches from outlets writing for a different reader.)
Most trade coverage treats Maharani as a footnote on Qureshi's résumé, a show to mention before pivoting to the film slate. That misses the point. Five seasons on a single Indian streamer, without a massive IP or franchise hook, is the kind of quiet commercial proof that makes a production company viable. It's the reason Saleem Siblings can exist as more than a logo on a poster.
Where to find Qureshi's current and upcoming work in India:
- Maharani (Seasons 1–5): SonyLIV
- Baby Do Die Do: Theatrical release July 2025; OTT window unconfirmed, but SonyLIV or Prime Video India are most likely given her existing relationships
- Toxic: Theatrical release window TBD; pan-India release expected given Yash's crossover pull; OTT rights unconfirmed
Movie OTT will carry updated streaming availability for all three properties as deals are announced.
Why Geethu Mohandas Directing Toxic Matters
The choice of Geethu Mohandas to direct Toxic keeps pulling focus. Mohandas built her reputation on Liar's Dice (2013), a spare, emotionally precise film that earned India's submission for the Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language Film category. Stepping from that into a Yash-scale blockbuster is a significant gear change.
Qureshi told Variety she described it to Mohandas as her "Barbie moment" — a filmmaker known for intimate work suddenly operating at an entirely different scale. Greta Gerwig came from Lady Bird and Little Women and was handed a $145 million production budget. Whether Mohandas can pull off the same trick is the actual question Toxic raises. The comparison flatters, but it also obscures a real difference: Gerwig had Warner Bros.' full marketing apparatus and a globally pre-sold toy brand, while Mohandas is working within an Indian production ecosystem where a woman director on a tentpole of this size has almost no precedent to lean on. Hard to say if the infrastructure is even there yet.
Nachiket Samant, directing Baby Do Die Do, is a less internationally profiled name — which makes the Saleem Siblings' decision to bring the project through their own banner rather than attach it to an established production house a meaningful one. They're betting on the material and on themselves. Saqib Saleem, Qureshi's brother and co-producer, is a working actor in his own right (83, Race 3). Saleem Siblings isn't a vanity vehicle. It's two industry professionals with existing relationships choosing to build infrastructure rather than freelance indefinitely.
What's Actually Coming and When
Baby Do Die Do has the tightest timeline. A July 2025 release date is on the calendar. Trailer should surface within the next four to six weeks if the date holds. That window puts it up against Thug Life, the Kamal Haasan-Mani Ratnam action film currently eyeing the same corridor — a brutal slot for a debut indie banner, and one that'll test whether Qureshi's name alone can carve out screen count against a Tamil-language event release.
Toxic is the bigger commercial event, but the release window is softer. Given the scale of production and Qureshi's stated ambition — a Western theatrical release is part of the plan — a phased rollout makes sense. KGF: Chapter 2 and RRR both used staggered release strategies to build international momentum before landing on streaming platforms. Hard to say if Toxic has that infrastructure behind it yet, but the intent is clearly there.
Maharani Season 5 is in post-production. SonyLIV will announce the premiere date.
What strikes me stepping back is that Qureshi's Cannes appearance functioned less as promotion and more as positioning. She's not selling a specific film right now. She's establishing a creative identity that can operate across scales — blockbuster spectacle, noir genre work, long-form political drama — without being reducible to any single one of them. That's harder to build than a hit. And it takes longer.
"My learning has been not to be too attached to the previous version of yourself," she told Variety, "because that just makes you stagnant."
Next Steps: Trailers and the Western Push
Baby Do Die Do is the nearest-term event — July 2025 theatrical date, trailer expected imminently. Toxic's Western theatrical ambitions will require distribution partnerships that haven't been publicly announced. Watch for deal announcements out of major market events in the second half of 2025. Maharani Season 5 will land on SonyLIV before year's end.
And somewhere in that list of projects Qureshi can't yet talk about, there's presumably at least one that lands her at Cannes with a film in selection. She said "inshallah." That's not a no.
For the latest confirmed streaming availability for Toxic, Baby Do Die Do, and Maharani across regions, Movie OTT has current platform data as deals are reported.
