Since its inception in 1990, the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) has capitalized—in every possible literal and metaphorical way—on its location. Mumbai, albeit fallaciously, is associated in popular imagination with both, the identity of Indian cinema, and unbridled economic possibility. These symbolic registers are catnip for a national film festival: its location in the city has often meant that MIFF, which claims to be “Asia’s largest short fiction, documentary, and animation film festival” in its promotional literature, has been able to promise filmmakers an audience of committed cinephiles, and the possibility of discovering lucrative distribution avenues.

Started more than three decades ago by the Films Division of India, which was constituted in 1948 under the aegis of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting with the stated aim of producing “documentaries and news magazines for publicity of Government programmes,” the festival has been a significant event for documentary filmmakers.¹ Despite struggling with issues of censorship, the festival has at least attempted, with varying degrees of success, to bring together filmmakers of varying ideologies and sensibilities.²

For 17 editions, the festival has been typically held at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), a privately owned and highly celebrated cultural centre that has also produced the country’s first and only professional orchestra, and the Films Division complex. MIFF has consistently benefitted from the cultural capital of NCPA, which has been associated in popular discourse with a commitment to preserving and nurturing marginalized Indian art forms. The 18^th edition, which was held from June 15- June 21 this year, marked a significant departure from most of its earlier iterations. Offering further evidence that capital is fluid and that the contours of the nation-state are ever-mutating, this year’s edition of MIFF spilled over into various other cities including Pune, which is located 150 km from Mumbai in the state of Maharashtra, the national capital Delhi, and Chennai, capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Since the Films Division, along with several other cinema-related state-run organizations such as the National Film Archives of India (NFAI) and the Directorate of Film Festivals, was formally merged into the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) from 2023 onwards, the title organizer of this year’s edition was a centralized monolith. Media outlets such as Scroll.in, which had once commented on the capacity of the Films Division to bring together diverse, even dissenting, filmmakers through the platform of MIFF, observed that the NFDC-helmed 2024 edition had completely ignored in its schedule several important films that are critical of the Indian government ³. NCPA was completely axed as a venue. In Mumbai, the festival was held in the buildings of the Films Division complex, including the National Museum of Indian Cinema (NMIC). Opened in 2019, the museum works to recruit cinema history into the ongoing task of nation-building. In its many departures from tradition, the 18^th edition of MIFF attempted a fairly rare experiment with its approach to the creation of space and the interpellation of audiences as a national film festival. Unsurprisingly, its failures are more instructive than its successes.

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The complex of the National Museum of Indian Cinema, where the festival was held this year. (Source: Museum Website)

In Mumbai, the Films Division complex had been painstakingly decorated for the festival: complete with a red carpet, several food stalls, and selfie points, the complex looked like it was dressed up to host a Big Fat Indian Wedding. It is instructive that the Films Division complex is located in an extremely affluent part of South Mumbai a few minutes away from Antilla, the residence of Mukesh Ambani, one of Asia’s richest men, and quite far away from the suburbs, where most of the Hindi film industry is based. Unlike the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, which is enormously popular among cinema audiences and the media, and has grown to scatter itself across various parts of Mumbai, MIFF has always been stationed in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of the city. But by choosing to base itself only at the Films Division complex, MIFF is now neither associated with NCPA’s high-brow (even elitist) legacy of promoting and nurturing serious art, nor with the suburbs’ unabashed embrace of and proximity to popular cinema. From this uncertain place, corpulent with an excess of lights and tinsel, it radiated uncertainly to various venues. The result was that the experience of the festival was deeply uneven. In Pune, for instance, the festival was organized at the building that was previously the headquarters of the NFAI (and continues to function as an archive after the NFDC merger). This venue is located a stone’s throw away from the Film and Television Institute of India, and as such, is frequented by several students of the institute. MIFF had not been adequately advertised as a festival committed to providing a platform for various styles of filmmaking. Consequently, the festival was quite poorly attended in a locality that is teeming with students who are being systematically taught film theory and practice through exposure to many award-winning international and national films: this is an area that would have otherwise been the perfect location for a film festival that does not include any commercial feature-length fiction films in its schedule.

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Entrance to the National Museum of Indian Cinema decorated for MIFF 2024 (Source: Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting)

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The building which houses the National Film Archives (Image Licensed Under Creative Commons)

MIFF has never been a very glamorous film festival. As such, it has always aimed to cultivate some kind of relationship with the margins: it is focused on cinema formats that have been woefully marginalized in an otherwise famously film-crazy country and has never attempted to attract as much attention to itself as several other more popular state-run festivals. On the other hand, stuck with the aim of “mirroring society,” it has been unable to re-imagine the country in any real way and has instead regurgitated mainstream narratives of Indian society ⁴. This edition of MIFF has skewed the paradigms of the festival’s pre-existing relationship with centre and margin: far from brokering a relationship with margins, it has actively coded centre and margin within itself by spreading outward from Mumbai. It sought hard to be large and stylish in a bid to capture the attention of audiences throughout the country and attempted to mainstream ideas of Indianness that were previously written off as unsubstantiated fantasies of fringe elements. This, as outlined, resulted in an unevenness in the way the festival used and created space, but it also led to several strange inconsistencies in its programming.

While the program for the 2024 edition included many extremely well-researched and popular films that have already won awards at several national and international film festivals, it also featured extremely poorly-researched documentary films that could, at best, be described as extended slide shows with voice-overs. The former kinds of films were picked to bolster the largeness of the festival, while the latter were picked to mainstream widely discredited narratives regarding India’s history. Examples of the latter are films such as Ranga Vaibhoga, a Kannada film in which the stated legacy of a classical Indian dance form comes across as under-researched and B. B. Lal “Doyen” of Indian Archaeology which lacks historical rigor. Films such as these drive home, with a convincing urgency that is often beyond the capability of even the most eloquent theoretical projects, the need to reexamine the politics of artistic interventions that brand themselves as decolonial or postcolonial. Aping the template of early Films Division documentaries, these films make several problematic claims as they attempt to decolonize Indian history.

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Poster for The Golden Thread (Source: Director’s website)

Among the former were films such as Sreemoyee Singh’s And Towards Happy Alleys (2023), which was screened last year at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, among others. It also won Best Feature Film International Competition at the BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema). Another example is Nishta Jain’s The Golden Thread (2022), which had already won eight awards at various international film festivals before being screened at MIFF. And Towards Happy Alleys is a moving account of Singh’s journey through Iran, while The Golden Thread follows workers at a jute factory in Kolkata. Inspired by her love for the country’s language, poetry, and songs, Singh’s film is a deeply personal and insightfully lyrical exploration of the connections between Iran’s cultural and social landscapes. And, Towards Happy Alleys was a product of the director’s PhD research, and is anchored by multiple conversations between her and Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. The Golden Thread immerses viewers in the sights and sounds of the jute mill while still managing to ask questions about the tangled connections between men, women, and machines. Both films were awarded by the festival: Singh’s won the Dadasaheb Phalke Chitranagari Award for Best Debut Director, while The Golden Thread won Best International Documentary Film.

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Iranian director Jafar Panahi being interviewed by Singh in And, Towards Happy Alleys (Source: Director’s Official Website)

The jolts administered by MIFF’s choices in programming were somewhat palliated by the films it chose to award, and the citations that it wrote for them. Nirmal Chander Dandriyal’s 6-A Akash Ganga—which chronicles the life of the deeply reclusive and gifted Indian musical artist Annapurna Devi through the eyes of her disciple Nityanand Haldipur—won the award for Best Indian Documentary Film. A companion piece to the director’s 2019 documentary Guru Maa, which arrived at an outline of the illustrious singer by stringing together testimonies of several of her most illustrious students, G-A Akash Ganga is named after the home of the fiercely private artist and attempts to examine the artist from closer quarters than its predecessor. Chander’s latest documentary includes several rare photographs, and several clips shot before Annapurna Devi’s passing in 2018. The citation pinpoints the importance of the film, and even raises important questions about the episteme with which the value of documentary films ought to be gauged: “Her [Devi’s] brilliance and talent would have remained hidden but for this intimate telling by flute-player Nityanand Haldipur, disciple and gatekeeper to the legendary musician. He lets us into his world step by step telling the fascinating story of a famously gifted musician, guru, woman, and wife whose artistic and personal life took unexpected turns over and over, leaving one in awe and profoundly moved.” Another example is Liam Lopinto’s The Old Young Crow, a Japanese animated short that won the award for Most Innovative Film. An experiment that blends several media into each other, the film is an excellent example of how the disjunctures in teleological narratives of media evolution can be illustrated creatively. It has been cited for “inventive, magical storytelling of multiple dualities”. Barkha Prashant Naik’s Konkani-language short Salt, which won Best Indian Short Fiction Film, focuses on a father-son duo attempting to make peace with the sudden demise of the woman of the family. In 11 minutes, the film explores important cross-hatchings between sexuality and grief by focussing on a marginalized subject while mobilizing a language and milieu seldom mainstreamed in Indian media. Naik has been cited for exploring an “inter-generational understanding of sexuality in an unusual and refreshing way.”

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A still from The Old Young Crow (Source: Producer’s Official Website)

It is worth noting here that the 18^th edition of MIFF attempted to make room for several other student films set in and coming from regions that are poorly understood by the larger Indian population. These films are not always sophisticated in their technique, but while their particular brand of formal rawness has the potential to lead to the invention of a new style, the worlds in which they are set deserve to be shown with an insider’s insight. These films do not explicitly lay claim to a thirdness, declare loudly the goal of decolonization, or proclaim any sort of Indianness, but they are excellent examples of the mechanisms by which national festivals such as MIFF can potentially advocate for a plurality of filmic languages while also arguing for the need to anchor stylistic idioms in a historical context⁵. A moving example of such a film is Abhijeet Pachangane’s Hirnaicha Amba, which was screened out of competition in the National Prism Student Section. Pivoted on an unlikely friendship forged by a boy while he is on his summer break, the film is able to depict, often with poignant sharpness, an old woman’s loneliness, a child’s curiosity, and a middle-aged man’s preoccupations. But it is particularly sharp in its capacity to root the film in the landscape of rural Maharashtra, while still alluding to universal emotions and experiences.

Several of the films screened at MIFF are available for viewing online⁶. Even though exigency or lack of choices might have been among the reasons the festival chose to include these films in its program, MIFF’s willingness to include otherwise accessible but mostly unknown films is commendable. Like a library or an Encyclopaedia in which it is possible to chance upon a thing that you didn’t even know you were unaware of, a film festival is meant to get us to embrace the unknown, or at least the less-known. The decision to include films otherwise available on the internet has important political repercussions; it has the potential to telegraph that if film festivals institutionalize cinema, publics, and the relationships between them, then MIFF is willing to recruit a range of members—be they films or audiences—to bolster the institution of cinema, and in turn, its capacity to articulate audiences with ideas of Indianness.

Although MIFF claims, as stated at the outset, to be the continent’s largest festival meant for documentary cinema, questions of exactly how the festival is able to make this claim, or indeed, or how film festivals can (or if they even ought to be) spoken of in terms of size, were left largely unaddressed in this year’s edition. However, organizers were careful to reiterate this claim either before, and sometimes even after, every film screening held in Mumbai. In Pune, on the other hand, screenings were neither preceded nor followed by any address of any kind. Audiences silently filed into and out of the preview theatre, amid a strange silence that was reminiscent of Hannah McGill’s observation while attending the Edinburgh International Film Festival, “it all had a ghostly feel.”⁷ This is not to say that the Mumbai venue was bustling with energy and activity. Silences there were all the more conspicuous because they were surrounded by the noise of largeness and excess, not only of the festival but also of the city itself. Over the week in which it was held, it gradually became quite clear that MIFF has begun to mirror the contemporary public sphere in India. It aimed to stun audiences into silence: on the one hand by grabbing a majority of people by the throat with spectacle and by blatantly ignoring various minorities on the other. If any other voices are to speak in this oppressive silence, then they must learn to veil their subversion. Examples of such films at the festival include Neha Dixit’s In Search of Kasturi, which advocates for a more critical relationship with the Western template of the nature documentary, and Singh’s And Towards Happy Alleys, which underlines the need for subversion. Or even, for that matter, the package of French animated films curated by freelance producer Olivier Catherin: of the six animated shorts in the package including Two Sisters, which is reminiscent of the visual style of Soviet animated films and the experimental film Box Cutters, none was made by a French filmmaker. Instead, as Catherin outlined in a Question-and-Answer session after the screening, they were all made by immigrants or students who had studied in the country.

The 18^th edition of MIFF is an excellent case study for what exactly is likely to happen when a national film festival becomes preoccupied with size. It is much as people and politics in intensely private and openly public spheres have taught us to expect: operating from a painfully obvious inferiority complex, it becomes so bent on maximizing the space it occupies that it is unable to ever decisively make a place for itself. Armed with spectacle and puffery, it can create a public that is completely content with regurgitating narratives that are appealing because they are imbued with the charge of largeness. But as Wong writes, “…film festivals create the possibilities of the formation of a wider public sphere, even with a public that participates in propagandistic film festivals but goes beyond and transforms them”. It thus also has the potential to catalyze the formation of a counter-public that aims not merely to look past a rhetoric of bigness, but directly at it with the goal of challenging an episteme that bases itself on supremacy through size.⁸

Notes

1. For a concise account of Film Division’s history of propaganda, see Arvind Rajagopal, “The Rise and Fall of Secular Realism: Notes on the Postcolonial Documentary Film from India,” in How Film Histories Were Made, ed. Malte Hagener and Yvonne Zimmermann, Materials, Methods, Discourses (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), 283–314, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.14170605.15. ⮭
2. MIFF has not been very well-attended in the last few years and has also not been covered extensively by the Indian media. Most outlets directly carry press releases detailing the opening and closing ceremonies of the festival. Some of the causes for this inattention also originate in the history of audience response to the films produced by the Films Division; this inattention takes off from the attitude with which scholars and journalists have frequently approached the Films Division’s efforts to produce documentary films. As Rajagopal writes, “The history of Indian documentary films is that it [documentaries produced by the division] made no difference. And since the effects aimed for were not achieved, there is little point in studying this site of state practices, or so it is assumed”. (294) ⮭
3. Nandini Ramnath, “‘Scope for Improvement’: Films Division’s Director General Outlines Plans for the Revamped Outfit,” Scroll.in, May 30, 2022, https://scroll.in/reel/1025107/scope-for-improvement-films-divisions-director-general-outlines-plans-for-the-revamped-outfit; Scroll Staff, “MIFF 2024 Kicks off with Promise of Support to Filmmakers: ‘The Objective Is Development of Films,’” Scroll.in, June 15, 2024, https://scroll.in/reel/1069324/miff-2024-kicks-off-with-promise-of-support-to-filmmakers-the-objective-is-development-of-films. ⮭
4. Scroll Staff, “MIFF 2024 Kicks off with Promise of Support to Filmmakers.” ⮭
5. I refer here to the Third Cinema for which Solanas and Gettino advocate. They write,

   “The anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries constitutes today the axis of the world revolution. Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point - in a word, the decolonisation of culture.” (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” Cinéaste 4, no. 3 (1970): 1–10.)

   ⮭
6. Salt is available for viewing on Netflix India’s YouTube channel. The Old Young Crow can be accessed at the YouTube channel named Short of the Week. Jonathan Hodgson’s Roughhouse, which was screened as part of the French Animation package can be viewed on the YouTube channel of one of its producers, Papy3D. Nirjara, which won the award for Best Indian Animation Film, can be viewed on the filmmaker’s YouTube channel. Mascarpone screened as part of a series of films from the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg (and named the Babelsberg Package) can be viewed on the institute’s Vimeo Channel. ⮭
7. H. McGill, “Film Festivals: A View from the Inside,” Screen 52, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 280–85, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjr017. ⮭
8. Cindy Hing Yuk Wong, “Publics and Counterpublics: Rethinking Film Festivals as Public Spheres,” in Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, ed. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist (London : New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 83–99. ⮭

Author Bio:

Damini Kulkarni is an Assistant Professor (Media and Film Studies) at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts in Pune, India. Her research interests include cinema audiences, film reception and critical digital theory.