In ‘Fucktoys’, Annapurna Sriram Gives Birth to a New Genre of Cinema
Words: Luna Sofia Miranda | Photos: Noelle Duquette | Styling: Isabel Simpson-Kirsch | Horses: Waylon and Emmylou courtesy of @lilbarn_ridingschool
With her feature film debut, Fucktoys (2025), Annapurna Sriram does more than defy expectations about what a serious film should be; she gives birth to a new genre of cinema.
While seismic shifts are happening to our governments, our climate, and our technology, we are trapped in a cinematic landscape that is plagued by remakes, reboots, and regurgitated ideas. Moviegoers are left starving for stories that are relevant to the changing world around us.
An instant cult classic and a radical reimagination of what a movie can be, Fucktoys is the bubblegum grindhouse, neo-camp film of your wet dreams. Set in Trashtown USA, a post-apocalyptic city made of glitter, garbage, and abandoned dreams, Fucktoys follows AP, a sex worker who must break a curse that is plaguing her. In order to pay a psychic to perform the healing ritual, AP needs $1000 and a sacrificial lamb.
Determined to make the money overnight, AP embarks on a wild goose chase through the neon lit underbelly of Trashtown. Accompanied by Danni, her hot masc lover (played by Sadie Scott, whose bad boy bravado could match that of James Dean) we are taken on a sparkly misadventure where two poor, sex-working queer folks are at the center of the story.
Fucktoys is a grind where its main characters never stop hustling, avoiding a common pitfall that affects many sex worker movies; the sex part of ‘sex-work’ is emphasized, while the ‘work’ aspect is omitted. The film puts the work back in sex-work, and never ceases to deliver on its high-camp, femme aesthetic.
“Growing up I didn’t get to see a lot of movies that had girls who look like me get to be the object of desire. The few movies I did see were Bollywood or Mira Nair movies, but they didn’t feel like an American movie where someone like me - who is of mixed nationality but also American, gets to be the object of desire.”
It’s no surprise that Annapurna was nominated for the 2026 Independent Spirit’s Someone to Watch Award. And while she pioneered a new genre of film, Annapurna isn’t caught up with words. “I think that this film is so much more than the words that we have, and I love when other people come up with how they would talk about it. It’s their movie, they should describe it.”
After watching Fucktoys, I confessed to Annapurna that I felt a strong sense of ownership over the film- like when you discover an underground artist, and don’t want your mainstream friends to start listening to them. “That is something that people like you and me have been deprived of,” says Annapurna. “… it speaks to how hungry we are for art that feels so closely aligned to who we are.”
Annapurna aligned the narrative arch of her film to mirror the female experience. “In patriarchal culture, the female experience is really fun, sexy, and playful. It (the film) is the ‘fun party girl’, it’s easy to be around… As the movie goes on, the facade slowly drops, and it becomes a real person. Which is like what it is to be a woman. We can’t maintain this ‘fun party girl’ all the time. Underneath that performance is a real person dealing with real life, real fear, real danger…”
These themes have resonated with audiences everywhere; after winning the Special Jury Award for the Narrative Feature competition at SXSW, Fucktoys has screened at festivals all over the world. For Annapurna, this is just the beginning. “I feel like the Independent Spirit Award nomination with ‘Someone to Watch’ is the first step of a new chapter. It’s taking us to the next level…now this film is entering the arena of serious cinema.”
But Annapurna isn’t interested in getting Hollywood’s “stamp of approval” - she wants to shift the conversation about what serious cinema looks like in the first place. AP is a brown woman who is at times naive, incredibly goofy, sentimental, and deeply flawed. While Hollywood prefers seeing brown people in movies where their plot is directly related to a cultural or ethnic struggle, Fucktoys explores oppression and resistance from a new lens.
“Growing up I didn’t get to see a lot of movies that had girls who look like me get to be the object of desire. The few movies I did see were Bollywood or Mira Nair movies, but they didn’t feel like an American movie where someone like me - who is of mixed nationality but also American, gets to be the object of desire.”
“It is an homage to so many past forms of filmmaking,” says Annapurna. “Like New Wave, 70s American Indie Explosion…Exploitation, Camp, Grindhouse, and my goal was to create this nostalgic love-letter homage, but also to make something that had all this aesthetic, but also this grounded, earned, heartfelt story in the middle of it.” Unapologetically rooted in its femininity, Fucktoys makes a sophisticated and scathing criticism of wealth disparity, not despite its high-femme foundation, but because of it.
Inspired by the 1960’s Sexpot archetype, Annapurna created the character of AP, who is a Southern-American, Brown Bimbo. While Annapurna is of South Asian and White descent, she was raised in Nashville, and strongly identifies with her Southern roots, describing herself as a country girl who is also a pro-domme and a filmmaker. Annapurna and her film challenge norms around who a brown girl can be.
Told time and again that “women filmmakers are always going to be a risk, never an investment,” Annapurna made Fucktoys hoping to inspire queer and brown folks, sex-workers, and women to tell their own stories. As late stage capitalism comes to a fever pitch and Hollywood fails to deliver movies that reflect the perspectives of the global majority, Fucktoys offers us a different path. Maybe Hollywood dying isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it’s time for something new.
