The Lunchbox, 2013
Cafe Regular Cairo, 2011
Batra began his filmmaking career by writing and directing shorts. His Arab language short Café Regular, Cairo, screened at over 40 international film festivals and won over 12 awards including Critics Prize (FIPRESCI) Best Film at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Best Film at German Star of India. Batra was part of the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors lab with his project "Story of Ram" in 2009. Where he won Time Warner Story Telling Fellow at Sundance Film Festival and Annenberg Fellow at Sundance Film Academy. In 2011 Batra came to India to make a documentary on the lunchbox delivery system in Mumbai. It was this venture of Batra's which conceptualized his first feature film The Lunchbox (2013). He developed this project through the TorinoFilmLab Framework programme in 2012.
The Lunchbox premiered at the Cannes Critics Week 2013 and won Rail d’Or (Grand Golden Rail). At Cannes the movie prompted a bidding war. Sony Pictures Classic acquired the North American rights of the film. The Lunchbox has been nominated for 33 Awards and won 25 so far. In 2014, Batra founded his own production company PoeticLicense Motion Pictures and currently developing a slate of films.
Batra was nominated for a BAFTA Award for The Lunchbox in the category Film Not in the English language in 2015.
He has directed the English-language film The Sense of an Ending, starring Jim Broadbent. The film is an adaptation of Julian Barnes’ Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending.
