Fractured Communities and Festering Wounds at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival

The 31st Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) screened over 200 films from 39 countries across 21 venues. With 2025 marking the birth centenary of the enfant terrible of Indian cinema, the great Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, who dedicated much of his life documenting the anguish of Partition, it was fitting that the focus was on how filmmakers today are engaging with the challenges of displacement. 

In his opening address, festival director Goutam Ghose articulated the curatorial philosophy underpinning the program:

“The world’s more divided than ever. Violence, destruction and chaos seem inescapable with rising religious, political and cultural intolerance all around. Yet here we are living, passing through an age of greed that has pushed humanity into a dark corner. Still, calendars turn, and cinema continues to flourish. This surge challenges festivals striving to create quality amid quantity.”

Survival as Radical Defiance

Keeping the ‘personal is political’ throughline in mind, the films that were most evocative effectively distilled how communities are responding to a world in flux. Those that stood out presented a clear entry point into the lives and challenges of communities that have become largely invisible, due to a combination of geographical barriers, cultural differences, and political convenience. 

A great example of this is David Bim’s Al Oeste, En Zapata (To The West, in Zapata,  2025), which won the Best Film in the International Competition and the FIPRESCI Critics Prize. Nearly eight years in the making and shot mostly during the pandemic, Bim’s moving portrait of a family living on the margins near the Zapata Swamp, a Cuban marshland reserve, was the sole documentary feature in the festival’s International Competition lineup.

Al Oeste, En Zapata (To the West, in Zapata)

Through long takes and black-and-white cinematography, Bim creates a sense of immediacy and a cyclical rhythm that transports the viewer into the lives of Landi and Mercedes, a couple battling extreme odds to care for their son, Deinis. While Landi is away crocodile hunting in a protected area for weeks on end to provide for his family, Mercedes looks after Deinis, the family only briefly and occasionally reunited before Landi departs again. 

There is a Sisyphean quality to the endless cycle: Landi and Mercedes’ time apart in unforgiving conditions is akin to Sisyphus’ Herculean effort of rolling his boulder upwards, their scant time together as a family is the boulder reaching the apex, and Landi’s departure is the boulder falling.

Echoing from the radio are intermittent updates on the number of COVID casualties in Cuba as well as messages from the government that the situation is under control. The forced isolation during COVID may have been traumatic for many, but by juxtaposing the pandemic with the family’s lonely existence, To the West suggests that trauma is nothing when compared to the degree of isolation people living on the margins have historically had to contend with. These communities were reduced to mere statistics long before the pandemic arrived.

Ha Lyngkha Bneng (The Elysian Field)

If Bim’s film is an act of defiance against the isolation that many remote communities feel today, Pradip Kurbah’s Ha Lyngkha Bneng (The Elysian Field, 2025) is a cautionary tale about the future that awaits those who have been reduced to irrelevant statistics in the pages of history. Set in 2047, against the backdrop of the Khasi Hills in the state of Meghalaya, North East India, the film traces the lives of the six remaining members of the village of Laitduh. 

Like Bim, Kurbah also uses the radio to highlight how the fruits of progress are yet to be reaped by certain communities. Authorities proudly announce various development projects in the state of Meghalaya, while residents of Laitduh struggle to access basic amenities such as electricity and water. 

Kurbah uses the changing seasons as a deliberate rhythm that structures the narrative and employs a colour palette that underlines the various stages of grief—from denial to acceptance—that the surviving villagers go through while grappling with the fact that the future won’t be any better than their miserable present. 

For Kurbah, the film springs from a deeply personal space. When I sat with him after the screening, he opened up about the impetus behind it:

“In 2047, there’s a real possibility that things may indeed be like what is shown in the film, especially for certain remote regions. It’s a kind of warning to the people in my hometown, please, don’t let your future be like this. I would love to be proven wrong. But we need to be prepared for this eventuality. We are losing the sense of community, of really knowing each other.”¹

In the end, Kurbah took home the Best Director award in the festival’s Indian Language Competition. 

Close Encounters with Difficult Women

Over the last couple of years, a number of Indian films have tackled the complexities and intergenerational tussles of mother-daughter relationships. Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls (2024) interwove a coming-of-age narrative around a teenage daughter who sees her single mother as an adversary. Uttera Singh’s Pinch (2025), in turn, sees a young woman expecting her mother to stand up for her when she confesses she was sexually harassed by a known male figure, only for the parent to brush the incident aside. 

These films have given rise to what can be termed the ‘difficult woman’ archetype: modern female protagonists who are branded as deviant and viewed negatively for wanting to break free from patriarchal norms and expectations. Other Indian films like Karan Kandhari’s delightfully absurd Sister Midnight (2024) and Dominic Arun’s Malayalam-language superhero epic Lokah Chapter One: Chandra (2025) take this idea of deviancy up another notch by reimagining their female protagonists as vampires on the run, hunted by society for the threats they pose to the status quo. 

Chhora Jastai (Shape of Momo

Tribeny Rai’s Chhora Jastai (Shape of Momo, 2025) is about one such ‘difficult woman’, Bishnu, who travels back to her Himalayan village after quitting her city job. She returns to a house inhabited by women from three generations: her grandmother, mother, and sister. 

Bishnu is a misfit on multiple levels. Having lived in the city, she struggles to adjust to life in the village, and has to fend off arranged marriage proposals left, right and centre from the day she’s back. To make matters worse, she has to share space with her pregnant sister, a constant and slightly terrifying reminder of the kind of future that awaits her, one she has been subconsciously running away from. In her debut feature, director Rai shows incredible restraint, ensuring that even though Bishnu may come across as unlikable, no character is put on the dock and judged for their choices. After the film, Rai revealed what appealed to her about this idea of the ‘difficult woman’: 

“It’s very easy to be a ‘difficult woman’ in India. If you’re vocal, if you’re opinionated, if you call a spade a spade, that’s it—you’re branded a ‘difficult woman’. It’s as if only men have the right to behave this way… In mainstream Indian films, women are usually portrayed as righteous, those who can do no wrong. But in reality, we [women] are all imperfect, and we are very complex. I wanted to capture that.”²

Shape of Momo was crowned Best Film in the Indian Language  Competition. 

Ritwik Ghatak and the Festering Wound of the Partition

One of the most rewarding experiences at KIFF was getting reacquainted, thanks to centenary retrospectives, with the work of some great artists who have come to define the course of Indian cinema. Apart from a few limited options, boutique home video labels in India are few and far between, making it all the more challenging to engage with older films and to be in active conversation with the history of Indian cinema.

The festival held centenary celebrations of directors such as Ritwik Ghatak, Guru Dutt, and Raj Khosla, music composer Salil Chowdhury, and one of Satyajit Ray’s regular collaborators, Santosh Dutta. I encourage readers to consider the recent profile of Guru Dutt by Ashish Dwivedi,³ as well as Megan Carrigy’s primer on Ghatak.⁴

I want to hone in on Ghatak here, especially the degree to which the spectre of the Partition of Bengal haunts his work. There is an argument to be made that the Indian subcontinent has never fully reckoned with the wounds of the Partition, and this intergenerational trauma continues to fester unaddressed as time passes. Much of the contemporary myth-making around how present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh present themselves domestically and on the world stage can be traced back to cherry-picking a preferred narrative where each of these nation-states sees itself as the one that was wronged, when in reality, the lines between the oppressor and the oppressed are not so neatly defined. Through his work, Ghatak lays this uncomfortable truth bare and forces you to confront the human tragedy at the core of one of the largest forced mass migrations of the 20th century. 

Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread)

In Ghatak’s cinema, the possibility of a future is always just beyond reach, continually thwarted or interrupted by cosmic forces. In Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread, 1965), a brother and sister drift through the wreckage of the Partition, yearning for a home that keeps receding. Born in Dhaka, present-day Bangladesh, that yearning for a place to call home was Ghatak’s as well.⁵

Perhaps that’s why approaching Ghatak’s cinema purely from a technical standpoint, or from the mechanics of storytelling, doesn’t account for its depth and scope. His films are more about capturing an elusive emotional truth, and their form is in the service of that goal. His characters—particularly in the Partition Trilogy of Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (E-Flat, 1961), and The Golden Thread—are metaphors for a displaced people. The Bengal haunting his imagination is a spiritual homeland that’s been abruptly fractured into two, and his films attempt to stitch those fragments together again.⁶

Despite his untimely death at 50, Ghatak’s cinematic achievement is the invention of a unique language that is entirely his own, balancing the horrific trauma of displacement with the search for identity in post-Partition Bengal. In doing so, Ghatak is an important foil to the more widely celebrated humanism of Satyajit Ray, though no less significant in his own right.⁷

An Uncertain Future for Independent Filmmakers

It would be disingenuous if I didn’t explicitly acknowledge the fragile landscape in which independent filmmakers currently operate in India. Given shrinking theatrical windows and limited access to wider distribution, independent Indian filmmakers rely heavily on the film festival circuit to showcase their work. During the month I was in Kolkata, 46 of India’s leading independent filmmakers released a joint statement lamenting the harsh reality that Indian films which receive plaudits at international festivals still struggle to be seen at home.⁸

And yet, even the festival ecosystem—the last refuge for independent filmmakers—is under threat. The Mumbai Film Festival, run by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), an important avenue for many independent films to secure an India premiere, was cancelled for 2025, a year after losing sponsorship.⁹ In what feels like an absurd and trollworthy gag straight out of a Radu Jude film, the city instead hosted the Mumbai AI Film Festival (MAFF) last year,¹⁰ an entirely new offering singularly dedicated to celebrating artificial intelligence-generated slop, presented as ‘cinema’. 

Riverstone

You might think there must be some kind of silver lining here, but rest assured, things only get worse. Artificial intelligence is not the only extrinsic force that’s threatening the Indian film festival ecosystem. At the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), taking place shortly after KIFF, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which is the government’s official arm for regulating cinema screenings, initially denied clearance to 187 films that were part of the official selection. This contentious list came down to 19 by the time IFFK commenced. To expect any kind of logic in decision-making here is a bridge too far. For example, Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 (2025) was screened at KIFF but was magically denied clearance just a month later to screen at IFFK. What’s even funnier is that Sri Lankan director Lalith Rathnayake won Best Director in the International Competition at KIFF for Riverstone, and was there in person to receive his award. But then, riddle me this: Lalith’s feature somehow ended up among the 19 films not allowed to be screened at IFFK. Eventually, the list came down to six, and IFFK bowed to pressure from the central government, not screening those films.¹¹

That government clearance from a functioning democracy should be required to screen films at a festival goes against the fundamental ethos and purpose of the whole circuit. Ideally, festivals should stand as safe havens of artistic expression, where films can be screened without worrying about censorship or external pressures. It would be naïve and obtuse of me not to read this political interference as anything but a deliberate attack on whatever limited creative freedom remains in India today. The message is implied but obvious: the only films that can be made or screened theatrically, appear on streaming services and at festivals, are those the State permits. 

Kolkata International Film Festival
6 – 13 November 2025
https://kiff.in/

Endnotes