Richie Mehta's "Phoolan" walked into the Princess of Wales Theatre on Wednesday night and walked out to a standing ovation. The film had its world premiere in TIFF's Special Presentation section on September 17, and by all accounts the room did not hold back.

The film draws from Phoolan Devi's own memoir, "I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen," published by Editions Robert Laffont. Mehta's version zeroes in on one specific, brutal stretch of that life, the siege where thousands of men corner her in a village determined to kill her.

Sneha Kumari plays Phoolan Devi. The cast around her includes Anurag Thakur, Vikram Pratap Singh, Aakash Dahiya, Prateek Pachouri and Dev Dutt Budholiya.

The Toronto crowd got the full team on hand. Mehta was there, alongside producers Shareen Mantri Kedia, Kanwal Kohli and Kishor Arora of Namah Pictures, plus Shilangi Mukherji, who heads Prime Video India's SVOD business. That last detail is the one that matters for Indian audiences. Phoolan is headed for a streaming release on Prime Video, though nobody has put a date on it yet.

Mehta framed the project as a kind of corrective. "Phoolan Devi's story is one that demands to be told with honesty, and without compromise," he said in a statement issued around the premiere. "It felt essential to me to strip away the mythology and reveal the human underneath." He described the film's themes, resilience, dignity, the fight to claim one's own voice, as ones that travel across borders and decades, which is presumably part of the calculation behind opening a film about a dacoit-turned-MP from Uttar Pradesh at a festival in Canada rather than a multiplex back home first.

Shareen Mantri, one of the producers, pitched it in even bigger terms. "There are stories that belong not just to one person, but to all of humanity," she said, describing Phoolan's life as one defined by courage, dignity and an unbreakable will to survive, and framing it as the kind of narrative Amazon MGM Studios wants on a global stage.

Phoolan Devi remains one of the most argued-over figures in modern Indian history. Gang-raped as a young woman, jailed for over a decade without a trial, later elected to Parliament, and assassinated in 2001. Any film about her invites scrutiny, and this one carries the added weight of being built from her own account rather than someone else's version of events.

For now, TIFF has given the film its loudest possible entry, a full house on its feet at the Princess of Wales Theatre. What Indian viewers make of it depends on when Prime Video actually locks a release window, and that part, the makers haven't said yet.