In their sprawling variety, odd intensity, and pervasive weirdness, India’s cultures of cinema reception refuse to be corralled by any of language’s disciplining mechanisms. This is in part because they are associated with a history in which the work of education, agitation, and resistance came to be bound up thickly— and often even indistinguishably— from the project of nation-building and the consolidation of a national identity. The International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the oldest film festival in India and the first international film festival held anywhere in Asia, was meant to tame India’s famously wild audience: curating “artistic” and “quality” cinema from around the world, it aimed to discipline audiences by asking them to knuckle down and analyze films instead of getting up and dancing, and encourage them to display their interest in cinema.

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Audiences dancing to the song Naatu Naatu during the screening of RRR at Los Angeles’ Chinese Theatre, where it was shown as part of the Beyond Fest. Source: (Beyond Fest X Account)

The IFFI was first organized by the government in 1952, five years after the country gained political independence from Britain. While the IFFI began with the goal of educating Indian audiences about world cinema and global art cultures, its increasing entanglement with ruling dispensations and the marketplace has meant that —in more recent times—it has also hoped to teach the world a little something about Indian cinema and actively sell it a standardized notion of Indianness that is often overstructured to the point of being comically bizarre. These shifts in its goals have been mapped atop the changes in the organizing bodies, venues and the programming of the festival: organized sporadically between 1952 and 1974, it became institutionalized as a biennial event in 1974 and as an annual festival in 2004; once focused on bringing international cinema to educate audiences, the festival added an Indian Panorama section intended to represent the diversity of Indian cinema to foreign audiences. Originally taking place alternately in the national capital of New Delhi and other Indian cities, including Mumbai, it permanently shifted base in 2004 to Goa, perhaps the best-known Indian tourist destination among travellers in Europe, the US and the UK. While at first organized by the Directorate of Film Festivals, which was instituted primarily for this purpose, it is now being jointly helmed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and the State Government of Goa. Once a “specialized event, the internal dynamics of which was not of popular interest,” it now features “Premiere Galas” of popular Indian films and, in attracting some of Indian cinema’s most popular faces, makes quite a splash in popular discourse.¹

These shifts mean that the festival’s desire to encourage the display of interest in the diverse potentials of cinema from around the world is increasingly in tension with its drive to discipline, through cinema, the values associated with Indianness. This tension has been recognized by several theorists over the years.² In 1981, Sen soundly panned the eighth edition of the IFFI for its programming, decisively dubbing it a “flop” and castigating Indian officialdom for allowing bureaucratic red tape to hinder the unfolding of the festival.³ A few years later, Rajadhyaksha took the tenth IFFI to task for its pathological preoccupation with a unique selling proposition that could be convincingly hawked in the Western media market, which had caused it to focus on “maintaining a cultural aura.”⁴ In 2017, Radhakrishnan wrote that IFFI was “palimpsestic,” an index of its many histories, and therefore “a site of investigating the different layers of the relationship between film, state, and the market.”⁵

In turn, in 2025 the 56^th edition of the IFFI (or IFFI 56) attempted to conceal the tension at the heart of its conceptualization by resorting to spectacle: at once capable of being seen as both flop and hit, at once preoccupied with the auratic and the banal, at once a palimpsestic index of selective historicising and a slippery, frictionless surface glinting with the excesses of the present. In other words, the IFFI 56 ensured that, like a businessperson who invests in right- and left-wing media simultaneously to hedge bets and palliate risk, it covered all bases so as to render itself malleable to and insertable in all manner of discourses.

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Opening parade at IFFI (Source: PIB Goa)

There was one version of the IFFI that aimed to be flagrantly public, especially the opening and closing ceremonies (coupled, incredibly enough, with a parade), and the events on public stages that were so saturated with light, color and mindless acquiesce that it was impossible not to imagine audiences as soaking wet rags that could not possibly take any more. On the other end of the spectrum was the IFFI that had resolved to be silent: this one was about serious cinema that would attract serious cinephiles who knew how to value the capacity of films to encourage rebellion. This IFFI unfolded in long, snaking queues outside screenings of anticipated films such as Joachim Trier’s gently moving Sentimental Value and Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, in which attendees were often gushing with subversive fervor as they were allowed to trickle into the theatre. In both these incarnations, the IFFI continued to be spectacular: it reiterated its penchant for surplus, whether as an excess that would suffuse and saturate, or as an overabundance that would threaten to overflow and overspill.

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The official complete catalogue for IFFI 56, which was available on request at help desks

While each end of the spectrum made a very different bid on body and mind, they both allowed the festival to be laced with a particularly capitalistic understanding of choice: there was, after all, a prodigiously long list of “Things to Do” at the IFFI 56. This included a film bazaar for those seeking to pitch and listen to new ideas, experts-in-conversation events and masterclasses, an AI-related subsection of films, daily issues of The Peacock, a festival newsletter featuring interviews and round-ups, a small exhibition documenting the evolution of filmmaking technology, and a Netflix information booth. Options were scarce, however, for anyone whose trip to the destination festival was the product of a commitment to seeing a certain film: the excesses of the festival meant that there was plenty of room for non-committal immersion, but fidelity was constantly being thwarted. Nor were loitering or flânerie encouraged—wandering and wondering were impossible, given that every space was suffused with activity. To use the kind of spectacular verbiage which the festival itself encouraged, the IFFI 56 was noncommittally productive.

With spectacles dispersed across a wide semantic landscape like minefields, the IFFI 56 clearly did not aim to suture communities. It was each man for himself, a profusion of individuals weaving in and out of the 247-page program catalogue, dodging dubious attempts to be encouraged and disciplined, all the while attempting to access films that could move and provoke.

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Screenshots of the cover pages of The Peacock, which was accessible on the IFFI app and available on request at help desks

Beyond the films that became festival favorites because they had already been extensively discussed by Western media, this edition of IFFI offered several international films that deserve more attention globally. These films refused to be corralled easily by the festival’s penchant for the spectacular. Igor Bezinovic’s Fiume O Morte, Arnaud Dufeys and Charlotte Devillers’s We Believe You, and Ash Mayfair’s Skin of Youth (which won the Golden Peacock for Best Feature Film) are some examples. Bezinovic’s docu-drama about the early-20th-century Italian warrior-poet Gabriele D'Annunzio’s stunning rise and equally swift fall as the dictator of Rijeka, Croatia, is the kind of film that is often let down by the architecture of loglines. Audiences who would perhaps not have naturally reached for a film in which people “retell, reconstruct, and reinterpret the bizarre story about the 16-month occupation of their city in 1919” could be enchanted by the film if they encountered it at the festival. Irreverent, intelligent, and politically urgent, Fiume O Morte, reconstructs D'Annunzio’s 1919 seizure of Rijeka with a wonderful blend of staged reenactments and archival material. It treats its outlandish subject with the appreciation for the ridiculous that it deserves, and in the process gestures towards the very serious final consequences of totalitarian excesses that simply seem eccentric or ridiculous at first. We Believe You centers on Alice (played by a superbly restrained Myriem Akheddiou), a 40-year-old mother who must appear in court with her children when her custody is called into question. A taut courtroom drama that eschews exposition and rejects most of the tropes typical to the genre to unfold, one by one, the devastating consequences of child sexual abuse, We Believe You is also a sharp standout that thrives in the kind of patience that the environment of a film festival can encourage. Similarly, Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, a 211-minute marathon that follows Portuguese NGO worker Sergio’s (Sérgio Coragem) experience in Guinea-Bissau, relentlessly tests the audience’s capacity to stomach unease while addressing the unresolved and halting aspects of postcolonialism with an odd deftness. Set mostly in and around the capital city, the film tracks how Sergio’s ostensibly simple goal of evaluating a road-building project becomes entangled with complex friendships and erotic relationships. Since it aims to shock and galvanise, it is a film that must be screened and spoken about among audiences with histories of colonisation.

Popular and anticipated films also found a way to thwart IFFI’s desire to assign them to a particular end of its spectrum of spectacularity. The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, one of the festival’s more anticipated films, has the capacity to move audiences with a gentleness that asks for the pause of endless analyzing and coaxes a simple surrender. Set within a transgender community in a Chilean desert mining town in 1982, the film follows 11-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortés) as she navigates a gamut of experiences when her adoptive family of transgender women are persecuted as alleged carriers of a deadly disease. Superb performances by Cortes and Mathias Catalan—who plays the titular character—anchor a stunning film in which the lightness of visual composition deepens the political weight of a story that details lives lived at the margins.

Since 2015, the IFFI has been awarding a medal to “an outstanding film that best reflects Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals of peace, tolerance and non-violence” in collaboration with the International Council for Film, Television and Audiovisual Communication (ICFT), a UNESCO international advisory body headquartered in Paris. The ICFT-UNESCO Gandhi Medal has functioned as a reminder of India’s political legacy to the world. Among the films competing in the section this year was Nadia Fall’s Brides, which follows two British Muslim teenagers—Doe (Safiyya Ingar) and Muna (Ebada Hassan)—as they leave their London lives behind and travel to Syria in search of faith, and belonging. In the cultural and political context of the UK, where the figure of the Islamic State bride has been shaped by intense and often one-dimensional media coverage, the film offers itself as a potential corrective: it addresses pain, discrimination, hope and a deep yearning for belonging with wonderful performances that humanize the widely covered media story. In India, where the narrative this film is countering is missing, many of the film’s political aspirations remain unrealized, and the young girls often simply come across as misguided and naïve. Brides is a reminder of the capacities and limitations of counter-narratives.

This year’s IFFI was also a reminder of India’s current geopolitical aspirations. Even as it highlighted Japan as the Country of Focus, it included two other countries with newly added sections: Spain was celebrated as a Partner Country, while Australia was featured as a Spotlight Country. These collaborations resulted in the showcasing of films of varying qualities. My Melbourne, for instance, was a mostly patchy and labored series of short films that marked a collaboration between Indian and Australian governments and was meant to depict migrant experiences in the titular city. On the other hand, French-born Spanish director Oliver Laxe’s Sirât, selected as the festival’s mid-point screening, quickly emerged as a favourite. Stranding a father and son in the Moroccan desert, the film uses the search for a missing daughter to turn a road journey into an elemental meditation on grief and desolation.

While IFFI also screened films that have already received substantial attention within Western media and festival circuits, its choice of opening film—Brazil’s The Blue Trail by Gabriel Mascaro—and closing film—Thailand’s A Useful Ghost by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke—more clearly signalled the festival’s desire to distinguish itself from other international events of its ilk. Mascaro follows the journey of an elderly woman who escapes a state-sanctioned retirement colony while delivering a masterclass in rooted world-building, blending social critique with deadpan humour. A Useful Ghost, in which a dead factory worker returns as a ghost to help his family, mobilises the potential of the supernatural to reflect on the afterlives of capitalism in contemporary Thailand.

Film festivals have often influenced the creation of cinematic canons, and thus mentioning some Indian films showcased at IFFI comes laced with danger. Consider Jitank Singh Gurjar’s Vimukt, which follows a couple as they undertake an arduous pilgrimage the Maha Kumbh—one of Hinduism’s most sacred festivals, held at a site believed to be spiritually transformative—hoping that a ritual dip in the Ganges will heal their mentally challenged adult son, Naran (Nikhil Yadav). Since it is blessed with incredibly original work by cinematographer Shelly Sharma and editor Pavan Theurkar, and has a narrative that is ripe with cultural specificity, Vimukt appears tailor-made for insertion into a filmic canon. However, the film is tragically let down by its refusal to take any stand that might offend anyone in power. The Indian Panorama section, particularly, flailed about without direction, not only because several individual films left much to be desired, but also because the films collectively stopped several steps short of fulfilling the festival’s claim of representing the plurality of India’s aesthetic and political languages.

This was especially on display with Razneesh Ghai’s, 120 Bahadur, a film that has already entered popular imagination in India. 120 Bahadur is a Hindi-language film that dramatizes the 1962 Battle of Rezang La, in which an Indian army contingent fought Chinese forces in the high-altitude Ladakh region in an episode that has since become central to India’s modern military mythology. The film focuses on the valourous leadership of Major Shaitan Singh Bhati, who was posthumously conferred India’s highest military honour after the battle. A 137-minute-long unrelentingly loud paean to India, nationalism, and patriotism, the film is among a species that has especially thrived in the country in the last five years. Audiences often clapped and cheered with euphoria that could evoke fear. The Gala Premier screening of 120 Bahadur at the festival coincided with its release in cinema halls across the country. Since it incorporated a masala film, IFFI 56—for the duration of at least one screening—mirrored startlingly what was happening in Indian cinema halls at that very moment, its excesses becoming perfectly indexical of the country’s cultural landscape, and consequently, the costs of Indian cinema’s unthinking acquiescence to contemporary political regimes.⁶

Even as the festival itself demonstrated the dangers and risks associated with popular cinema, audiences at IFFI 56 testified to the appetite for cinema that encourages criticality. It is a truth well-acknowledged that the political climate in India, in which any dissent is met with violent censorshop, allows Indians to profess appreciation for the All We Imagine as Lights only after international validation (and production) has given them insurance against ludicrous political attacks back home.⁷ Hardly surprising then, that the same audiences that were impressed with 120 Bahadur were also the ones who thronged with desperate, rule-defying urgency to watch It Was Just an Accident, a film that has caused its director to be slapped with an in-absentia prison sentence in his home country but has covered itself with laurels in another. Generating international attention for its blend of humor and urgent social commentary, the film has since become a touchstone in discussions about the political potential of cinema. Panahi’s latest, with its capacity to weave in entertainment with an urgent political lesson, could potentially be an important corrective for a cinema culture that has frequently cast enjoyment and education as sharply opposing binaries.

Ultimately, the festival was able to move and expand, not because of, but despite its twin drives to discipline the wildness of cinephilia and encourage induction into a specific kind of national cinema: instead, audiences indexed India’s complex relationship with the political potential of cinema. It is, oddly, the wild cultures of film-viewing of audiences that theorists and historians have long dismissed as “mass” (even as they repudiated the films these masses watched) that can actively add “different layers” to “the relationship between film, state, and the market” and complicate the state’s projects of discipline and encouragement.

Notes

1. Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh. We Need to Talk about Indian Panorama: A Report from the International Film Festival of India 2017. Festival Reviews. July 10, 2018. https://necsus-ejms.org/we-need-to-talk-about-indian-panorama-a-report-from-the-international-film-festival-of-india-2017/. ⮭
2. Indeed, this tension, which has been IFFI’s gift to all state-organized Indian film festivals, erupted a short few weeks after IFFI during the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) had refused to issue censor exemption certificates to 19 films. The list of films that were not cleared for screening included several Palestinian titles and one Israeli film. However, after Kerala declared that the state government would screen the titles regardless, the centre reportedly cleared 13 of these films. Kerala’s ruling party, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) has had ideological and political differences with the central government (led by the Bhartiya Janata Party, which has never been a significant political force in the state). For more context, see TNM Staff, ‘“Bureaucratic, not political, reasons for agreeing to ban six films at IFFK”: Resul Pookutty’, The News Minute, 19 December 2025 <https://www.thenewsminute.com/kerala/bureaucratic-not-political-reasons-for-agreeing-to-ban-six-films-at-iffk-resul-pookutty#:~:text=Earlier%2C%20the%20Union%20Ministry%20of,titles%20and%20one%20Israeli%20film.> [accessed 23 December 2025]. ⮭
3. Sen, Dolly. “A Better Deal for Film Festivals on JSTOR.” Accessed December 11, 2025. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4369668?seq=1. ⮭
4. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “The Tenth International Film Festival of India: Scattered Reflections Around an Event.” Screen 26, nos. 3–4 (1985): 147–51. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/26.3-4.147. ⮭
5. Radhakrishnan. 266 ⮭
6. A masala movie (a term sometimes used disparagingly) is not rigidly defined, but is generally used to describe an Indian film which that has a penchant for mixing genres (often including a dash of romance and action), VFX-powered spectacles, and dramatic dialogues. ⮭
7. Payal Kapadia’s debut feature film All We Imagine As Light won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, and has been credited with representing an alternative Indian cinema to the world. However, the film is a co-production between Condor Distribution (France), Spirit Media (India)and September Film (Netherlands). For a breakdown of the aesthetic language of the film, see Krishendu Bose, ‘Lessons “All We Imagine as Light” Can Teach Bollywood’, The Indian Express, 6 January 2025 <https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/all-we-imagine-as-light-bollywood-9762698/> [accessed 11 December 2025]. ⮭