A year-end reflection on how festivals became classrooms, archives, shelters and movements—through writings by Utpal Datta, Vinta Nanda, Sohaila Kapur, Monojit Lahiri, and reportage of The Daily Eye—mapping cinema, culture and community across India in 2025.

The Daily Eye’s Festival coverage in 2025 documents India’s evolving film and cultural festival landscape—from WIFF Mumbai, KASHISH Pride Film Festival, Cannes restorations, and Prithvi Theatre Festival to grassroots screenings, art exhibitions, and digital access initiatives—foregrounding cinema, memory, activism, and cultural continuity through sustained criticism and reportage.

A Year That Refused to Treat Festivals as Spectacle

In the Festivals section of The Daily Eye, 2025 unfolded less like a calendar of events and more like a long, evolving conversation—sometimes celebratory, sometimes interrogative, often quietly radical. Across dozens of pieces written by Utpal Datta, Vinta Nanda, Sohaila Kapur, Monojit Lahiri, and The Daily Eye Newsdesk, festivals emerged not as glittering endpoints but as processes—classrooms, laboratories, archives, and shelters for culture under pressure.

What this body of work consistently insisted on was simple yet profound: festivals are no longer just about premieres and applause. They are about how culture survives, questions itself, and passes knowledge forward.

Festivals as Classrooms: Learning, Unlearning, Becoming

That shift is powerfully articulated in Utpal Datta’s coverage of the Guwahati Asian Film Festival (GAFF). Rather than framing GAFF as merely an inaugural success, Datta positions it as a landmark moment for Northeast Indian cinema—a space where filmmakers, scholars, and audiences collectively asserted visibility and confidence. The presence of Prasanna Vithanage, Onir, and Sheeba Chadha mattered not because of celebrity, but because of dialogue—on gender, region, and the politics of storytelling.

This pedagogical impulse continues in Datta’s account of the Teen Indie Film Awards (TIFA) at RV University, where festivals move decisively into academic spaces. Here, students are not passive viewers but active participants—writing, shooting, organising, questioning. Cinema education, Datta reminds us, thrives when theory meets practice and when failure is allowed to be instructive rather than shameful.

Emotional and Political Depth: Festivals as Acts of Hope

If Datta maps festivals as classrooms, Vinta Nanda traces their emotional and political undercurrents. Her coverage of Nisha JamVwal’s art sundowner featuring Lata Balakrishna reframes the festival as an intimate act of resilience. Against a backdrop of global unrest, this gathering by the sea becomes a quiet assertion of femininity, solidarity, and healing through art.

Nanda’s engagement deepens in her extensive writing around Waterfront Indie Film Festival (WIFF) Mumbai 2025, where festivals are imagined not as events but as ecosystems. Her conversation with Sridhar Rangayan situates queer cinema at the centre of contemporary discourse. Through WIFF’s curated queer package and Rangayan’s reflections on KASHISH Pride Film Festival, cinema emerges as testimony—documenting lives that mainstream narratives still struggle to hold.

This idea of festivals as living archives is further embodied in Nanda’s exchange with cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi. His documentation of disappearing single-screen theatres, and the screening of Chhayaankan, transform a festival session into an act of preservation. It is not nostalgia—it is urgency.

Process Over Product: WIFF as a Living Movement

If one festival consistently functioned as the structural spine of The Daily Eye’s Festival coverage in 2025, it was the Waterfront Indie Film Festival (WIFF) Mumbai 2025. What distinguished WIFF was not only its eventual scale, but the manner in which it was patiently grown—month by month, conversation by conversation—rather than unveiled as a finished product.

From its earliest articulations, WIFF positioned itself not as a once-a-year showcase but as a year-long cultural process. The Daily Eye’s reportage reflects this philosophy closely, documenting the festival’s evolution as an ecosystem rather than a calendar event.

This intent became visible at WIFF’s curtain raiser at NGMA Mumbai, where filmmakers and thinkers gathered to discuss the conditions in which independent cinema survives. Voices such as Shoojit Sircar, Rajat Kapoor, Sridhar Rangayan, Deepa Gahlot, and Richa Chadha framed independence not as a budgetary constraint but as a practice of courage, ethics, and community. What emerged was a shared recognition that festivals like WIFF must protect creative risk rather than reward market comfort.

That thinking carried through WIFF’s monthly pre-festival screenings, which operated as intimate salons rather than promotional previews. Films such as Anaar Daana, P for Papparazzi and Goolar Ke Phool were screened to provoke discussion—around form, language, region, and authorship—reaffirming the idea that small films grow when audiences are invited into dialogue, not dazzled into silence.

Among the most resonant moments in this build-up was the India premiere of Roots Across Continents by Kai deBenedictis, a 17-year-old filmmaker who transformed family archives into a meditation on migration, memory, and world history. Attended by three generations of his family, the screening embodied WIFF’s belief that storytelling begins at home but travels far beyond it.

WIFF’s commitment to process-driven cinema found clear articulation through its workshops and masterclasses. The Impact Workshop, led by Anupama Mandloi and Maya Rao, reframed filmmaking as social practice—where ethics, community engagement, and accountability are as central as aesthetics. The rain-soaked gathering at Rangshila Theatre brought together filmmakers, activists, trans storytellers, educators, and students, reinforcing WIFF’s identity as a movement-in-the-making.

This philosophy deepened further through the Conscious Storytelling Masterclass led by Sandra de Castro Buffington, which positioned cinema as a tool for empathy and behavioural change. Filmmakers such as Dr (Prof) Piyush Roy, Brahmanand S. Siingh, and Barnali Ray Shukla grounded the conversation firmly in Indian realities while maintaining a global outlook.

Equally significant was WIFF’s emphasis on collaboration and sustainability. The Masterclass on International Co-Productions, held in partnership with the Indo-Canadian Business Council, demystified treaties, insurance, and legal frameworks. Featuring Gayathiri Guliani, Arfi Laamba, Jamshed Mistry, and Maneck Dastur, and moderated by Rashmi Lamba, the session acknowledged a crucial reality: survival is as important as expression.

By the time WIFF Mumbai 2025 unfolded in October—with over 100 films across venues—the festival felt less like a debut and more like a culmination. Opening and closing films such as Feminist Fathima by Fasil Muhammed and Humans in the Loop by Aranya Sahay echoed the year-long conversations around agency, gender, technology, and dignity.

Panels featuring Hansal Mehta, Pratik Gandhi, Kabeer Khurana, Rahul Rawail, and others transformed WIFF into a genuine thinking space—one where disagreement was encouraged and consensus never imposed. The flagship panels curated in partnership with Applause Entertainment, Round of Applause, with actors, directors and writers were the highlight.

What The Daily Eye’s coverage ultimately makes clear is this: WIFF Mumbai 2025 was not positioned against mainstream cinema, but alongside it—building an alternative with care, rigour, and continuity. In a cultural economy driven by immediacy, WIFF chose patience. And in doing so, it offered a blueprint for how independent cinema in India might endure—ethically, collaboratively, and with imagination intact.

Beyond Film: Museums, Craft, and Material Memory

Festivals, The Daily Eye reminds us, are not limited to cinema. Sohaila Kapur’s lyrical exploration of the Heritage Transport Museum, Gurgaon reads like a personal journey through memory and design. Cars, trains, cinema props, and archival histories turn the museum itself into a festival of movement—demonstrating that curation is also storytelling.

Similarly, The Daily Eye’s coverage of Milaaya Art Gallery expands the idea of festivals into material heritage. By elevating embroidery into fine art and crediting artisans as co-creators, exhibitions like Terra challenge entrenched hierarchies of craft, ecology, and authorship.

Regional Stories, Global Conversations

A defining thread through 2025 was regional cinema finding global resonance. The Daily Eye’s report on Assamese filmmaker Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap premiering KOK KOK KOKOOOK at the Busan International Film Festival captures not spectacle but arrival.

That arc continues with Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) travelling from Sundance Film Festival back to India, proving that intimate, rooted stories can carry universal weight.

Heritage, Restoration, and the Politics of Memory

Festivals in 2025 also reaffirmed their role as guardians of cinematic legacy. At the Cannes Film Festival, the Film Heritage Foundation unveiled restored versions of Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri and Sumitra Peries’ Gehenu Lamai. The presence of Sharmila Tagore, the advocacy of Wes Anderson, and the labour of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur underlined restoration as cultural resistance.

In Mumbai, this legacy impulse continued through the nationwide 4K retrospective of Guru Dutt and the launch of the SCREEN Academy Fellowship by the Indian Express Group and Lodha Foundation, mentored by Subhash Ghai, Guneet Monga, Payal Kapadia, Resul Pookutty, and Anjum Rajabali.

Festivals That Question Themselves

A crucial dimension of The Daily Eye’s Festival coverage was its refusal to romanticise. Monojit Lahiri’s Are Film Festivals Tamashas or Reality Checks? interrogates whether festivals democratise cinema or merely circulate approval within elite echo chambers, drawing on insights from Shyam Benegal and Saibal Chatterjee.

That critique sharpens in Are the National Awards Losing Their Way?, where Lahiri traces the journey from Ray, Mrinal Sen, Benegal, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan to contemporary controversies—asking whether glamour has replaced gravitas.

Even popular culture comes under scrutiny in V-Day: Ishqbaazi or Dramabaazi?, which turns Valentine’s Day into a sociological case study of commodification, loneliness, and peer pressure.

Art as Diplomacy, Theatre as Community

Beyond cinema, exhibitions like Beyond Face Value at NGMA Mumbai, curated by Rukmini Dahanukar, reframed currency as cultural text. Bridges of Art: Argentina to India, curated by Jalpa H. Vithalani, brought together Julia Romano, Pablo Ramírez Arnol, and Gerardo Korn, dissolving borders through shared emotional geography.

The Kalanand Grants Exhibition foregrounded integrity and blind jury processes as radical acts, while Prithvi Theatre Festival 2025 reaffirmed theatre as community practice—through works by Akarsh Khurana, Mohit Takalkar, Atul Kumar, Mahmood Farooqui, and performances by Shreema Upadhyaya and Louiz Banks.

Perhaps the most urgent reminder of why festivals matter came from New Delhi with And Cinema Goes On at NIV Art Centre. Through suppressed films and uncompromising conversations around Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, and Dibakar Banerjee, the message was unmistakable: when art is silenced, festivals become shelters.

Taken together, this year-long body of work shows The Daily Eye’s Festival section as far more than a cultural diary. It is a map of how culture survives—through dialogue, memory, critique, access, and care. In 2025, festivals were not distractions from reality. They were ways of understanding it.

You can read all the festival reports and articles here.