MUMBAI: An Indian director whose award-winning new film tells the story of a bisexual teenager with disabilities has accused her country's censor board of “infantalising” viewers.

Shonali Bose's movie Margarita, With a Straw, named Best Asian Film at the Toronto film festival last month, is due for release in India early next year.

But it has yet to receive clearance from the country's all-powerful censor board, which imposed stringent cuts on an earlier film by the director.

“I am opposed to the very existence of a censor board,” the director told AFP from Los Angeles, where she lives, after her win in Toronto.

“I think there should be a non-political rating board like they have in the US that just sets the ages of who can see what."

Bose's 2005 film Amu, about India's 1984 anti-Sikh riots, went from cinemas to a DVD release because cuts required by censors for television broadcast “were equivalent to banning the film,” Bose said at the time.

She said the film was not restricted because of sexual or violent scenes, but because it focused on an episode of history the censors would rather have forgotten.

Asked how viewers would relate to the unconventional content of her new film, the coming-of-age tale of an 18-year-old girl with cerebral palsy set in Delhi and New York, Bose said the problem “is not with audiences”.

“It's with the government infantilising our audiences and feeling that they have the right to control what an audience can and should see,” she said.

The Toronto jury said Margarita, With a Straw, which stars Kalki Koechlin, had “created a character and a world that embody a love letter to life... in spite of overwhelming physical limitations”.

While the story is fictional, Bose says it is based on her cousin who suffers from cerebral palsy.

“I grew up knowing everything about this at close hand. But it only struck me to do a film on a character with this disability when (my cousin) candidly expressed to me that she wanted to have sex,” Bose said.

“It opened my mind to an aspect I had not considered and that had not been explored pretty much in world cinema, leave alone India.“

Directors have regularly expressed frustration with India's censor board, which is still governed by the Cinematograph Act of 1952.

A top official at New Delhi's film department said last year that the “rules are old” and the censor system needs to change as the country rapidly modernises.