Iffr

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025: Varsha Bharath’s ‘Bad Girl’, which marks music composer Amit Trivedi's Tamil film-music debut, has won NETPAC Award in IFFR 2025 Tiger Competition, previously won by Arun Karthick, Mani Kaul & Adoor Gopalakrishnan. But trolls hit out at the film's producer Vetrimaaran & presenter Anurag Kashyap. Why?

IFFR 2025 | Lipika Singh Darai on ‘B and S’: ‘In times of crises & war, people forget to talk about tenderness’

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025: Four National Award-winning indie filmmaker Lipika Singh Darai on the making of her latest epistolary film ‘B and S’, Hubert Bals Fund for her first feature ‘Birdwoman’ & choosing Odia over her mother-tongue Ho.

IFFR 2025 | Suman Mukhopadhyay: ‘Never have my films been in circulation; I’m an in-between in Bengali film industry’

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025: Suman Mukhopadhyay, whose film Putulnacher Itikatha (The Puppet's Tale) is in Big Screen Competition at IFFR, and whose brilliant debut 'Herbert' completes 20 years, talks about what ails & fails Bengali cinema, literary adaptations, censorship, Anurag Kashyap & Payal Kapadia.

Amit Dutta, the little-known most famous Indian auteur: ‘The kind of films I make should be sought out, not thrust upon people’

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025: In this final instalment of a two-part interview, the unparalleled Amit Dutta talks about his practice & influences, David Lynch, artist’s anxieties and trade-offs & why film bodies are irreplaceable.

‘Kumar Gandharva was not just a musical genius but also a profound scholar & thinker’: Amit Dutta & Kuldeep Barve

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025: In this first instalment of a two-part interview, indie filmmaker Amit Dutta & music composer Kuldeep Barve talk about their latest animation film 'Phool ka Chhand (Rhythm of a Flower)', on singing legend Pandit Kumar Gandharva, whose birth centenary was last year.

MAMI 2024 | Midhun Murali: ‘We wanted Kiss Wagon to emulate the feeling of anime and the confusing subplots of religious books’

MAMI Mumbai Film Festival: Kiss Wagon, director Midhun Murali and collaborator Greeshma Ramachandran's IFFR Rotterdam awarded Malayalam animation, screens thrice at MAMI's South Asia Competition at PVR Juhu, and then goes to IFFK Kerala.

What to watch at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024: ‘This year, MAMI is just MAMI, not Jio MAMI’, MAMI goes independent

MAMI 2024, from October 19-24 in Mumbai, is bookended by this year's Cannes Film Festival winners and peppered with more than 110 films many of which are prestigious global film festival winners from 45-plus countries, in 50-plus languages.

IFFR 2024 | ‘Meera wanted Radha to exist, as a better version of herself, to reach Krishna’: Anirban Dutta

Independent filmmaker Anirban Dutta, whose second feature Anubhuti premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam, talks about his highly stylised film on Krishna-devotee Meera's literature and not her life, and the need for slow cinema in India today.

IFFR 2024 | Animator Ishan Shukla: ‘Ramayana is much better than The Odyssey or Game of Thrones because it is so tragic’

After a short for 2023 Star Wars animated anthology, Vadodara-based Shukla’s ‘Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust’ premieres at IFFR Rotterdam. He talks about Ramayana, polarised world, using AI and cinema legends for his motion capture animation feature.

How this India-US womxn collective uses fiscal sponsorship to save the documentary film

Born out of the pandemic in 2021, Bitchitra Collective fosters Indian women and nonbinary non-fiction filmmakers in the US and India, those left stranded by Films Division’s closure, and is calling filmmakers to apply for its grants till December 30.

Making of Joram: Manoj Bajpayee, Devashish Makhija & a big studio make the subaltern run

In, perhaps, a first for independent cinema, a major Indian studio backs an Adivasi story. Zee Studios' Bajpayee-starrer, Makhija-directed manhunt thriller premiered at IFFR Rotterdam and released in theatres worldwide on December 8.

BIFFes 2023 | 'Family' and Don Palathara's 'grey cinema': Church, community, and the cunning

Crisis of an individual and a community in the Vinay Forrt-starrer 'Family', Malayalam independent filmmaker Don Palathara's layered sixth film, which had its world premiere at IFFR Rotterdam last month and is premiering in India at the 14th Bengaluru International Film Festival, on March 26.

Review | Before Kantara came Meghdoot, Rahat Mahajan’s mythological tragic love story

Much before Rishab Shetty fused folk performative art and cinema, independent filmmaker Rahat Mahajan, who competed for the prestigious Tiger Award at this year's International Film Festival of Rotterdam, deployed the visual grammar to write a teen romance