Zoya Akhtar and Farah Khan, Bollywood Directors

Zoya Akhtar and Farah Khan, Bollywood Directors - NYTimes.com:

Ms. Akhtar, 38, is among an emerging breed of female directors altering the contours of Bollywood, the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry. It has largely been a boys club behind the scenes. Though women have made inroads into editing, art direction, writing and production in the last decade, there are no studio-head equivalents of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s co-chairman, Amy Pascal, or DreamWorks’ chief executive, Stacey Snider.

Actresses draw the press’s attention, but actors are the bigger power centers, specifically the three unrelated Khans: Aamir, Shah Rukh and Salman, who have been stars for two decades. In the past female filmmakers were largely relegated to art-house films and smaller budgets. But now Ms. Akhtar and a handful of other women have cracked Bollywood’s glass ceiling by succeeding where it counts the most: the box office.