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In a region where native language is often overlooked, a young Bundelkhandi rapper from Madhya Pradesh, India works tirelessly on his first album. As he faces financial struggles and a lack of resources, the question remains: will he be able to make it and at what cost?

Fragmented selves, the illusion of time, and a village’s unseen elephants - five filmmakers confront invisible fears, like an untouched image of a tomorrow.

India, my nation, is being rebuilt. Her foundation is being laid on the imagined land that claims to be the birthplace of my grandmother’s God. In the mythology that she passed down to me during many summer nights, her God was magical, kind, imaginative and democratic, just like my India was supposed to be. But today, through its many retellings and reimaginings, the tale is being used as a political tool. This film attempts to remember, as well as dream, a forgotten nation.

The film focuses on the role of the local church as a community space through a personal narrative of a public school teacher, Hazel Pinto. Hazel grew up in the Bombay Improvement Trust Blocks at Agripada, a unique colonial architectural experiment in social housing, as a member of a working-class Catholic family in mid-20th-century Bombay. The film juxtaposes colonial missionary commentary, personal recollections of rituals, contemporary stills of the church, and archival footage of the industrial working class. It intertwines the personal with the political, examining gender, religion, and class shaping memory. The film advocates the preservation of untold histories, of the working class.

Gola Dreams journeys into the heart of Gola Gokarannath, a “Choti Kashi” in Uttar Pradesh, during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Through the lives of Surendra, a Dalit reporter with a near-invisible YouTube channel; Imran, an idealistic auto driver; and the town’s young army aspirants, the film uncovers stories of disenchantment, resilience, and hope. Against a backdrop of rallies, a defunct sugar mill, and a carnival-like mela, the film reveals a democracy both vibrant and broken. As rain floods polling day, Gola Dreams becomes a lyrical meditation on aspiration, marginalisation, and the fragile promises of India’s electoral theatre.

As Hindu nationalism and other dominant ideologies seep into Tamil Nadu’s political context, a cultural battleground takes shape where identity is contested, symbols are repurposed, and tradition is strategically redefined. Political parties compete to control narratives through appropriation, even as caste capital and social hierarchies remain firmly rooted. “Our Symbol is?” explores a state at a turning point: who defines its symbols, who benefits from their meaning, and in this struggle for power and identity, what will Tamil Nadu preserve and what will it leave behind?

In the secluded Himalayan village of Dhadkai in Jammu and Kashmir, many people can't hear or speak. Misra Khatoon and Mohammad Iqbal, a young couple in their 20’s, brace themselves with fear, anxiety and hope as they approach childbirth. As the time for the birth approaches, people gather around their home, creating noise with drums, utensils and whistling—a tradition to test the newborn's response, who if- as per their beliefs and experiences- cries loudly but keeps the eyes closed for the first two days, might be deaf. However, confirmation may take around 6 months of careful observation.

Gulnaaz remains committed to using community radio to shed light on injustices and oppressions faced by marginalised communities, despite constant scrutiny and control by her family and community. Through her empathetic storytelling, she brings attention to untold narratives and advocates for unity and harmony. Amidst her fight for social change, Gulnaaz grapples with her own struggles for freedom and autonomy. This is the story of a young Muslim woman dreaming differently in a patriarchal society determined to silence her.

In a village in the Niyamgiri mountains of Odisha's Eastern Ghats, a heroic effort is underway: barefoot ecologist Dr. Debal Deb and his 3 member-team are conserving in-situ over 1000 endangered heirloom varieties of rice. Odisha’s Eastern Ghats region is one of the world’s surviving biodiversity hotspots, with Adivasi communities like the Kondhs possessing the knowledge of growing multiple crops with their folk seeds, evolved over centuries. At the same time, the village and the wider region is irreversibly changing with the coming of genetically modified cotton seeds and associated chemicals. 'Seed Stories' takes a worm’s eye view of how this is reshaping a geography and a people steeped in agro-ecological knowledge, and altering their attitudes towards farming, food and ecology. It invites audiences to reflect on the question, 'What is sustainability?'

A portrait of the 17th century Indian princess Zeb-un-nissa who wrote Persian poetry under the nom de plume Makhfi (the hidden one). Daughter of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Zeb-un-nissa is an enigmatic figure in Indian history and her poetry is our only window into her life. The film positions Zeb-un-nissa's poetic expression within the extant zeitgeist of islamophobia, neglect and selective amnesia in India, tracing her work through three people.

January 2021. As farm protests raged on against the Indian farm-laws, an unlikely team of Indians embarked on a journey through the America – a classic “back to the future” quest. Because, four decades ago, similar market reforms were ushered in in USA. Who benefited? Who lost out? Farmers, consumers or the corporates? What happened with the removal of MSP? Through human stories of small farmers in America, Déjà vu is a reminder that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

With striking composition and a melodious play of light, Achal Mishra (Gamak Ghar, Dhuin) paints a meditative portrait of noted Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla. Through fleeting glimpses into his personal world, the film unfolds as an essay on the beauty, depth, and poetry of everyday life.

While visiting Ypres, Sachin learns that 1.4 million Indians were conscripted by the British to fight on the Flanders Fields during the First World War. Using audio recordings, letters, songs and archives, he brings his anonymous ancestors back to life, like ghosts inlaid in an immovable winter landscape.

It was the 77th year of India’s independence. The general elections for the 18th Lok Sabha were held from April and June, 2024, and queer rights were not on any political party’s agenda. A handful of parties made a token mention of queer rights on their manifestos, but none campaigned for them. “A Minuscule Minority” documents a crucial evolution in India's queer rights movement. It features conversations with young, second and third-generation activists, and looks at the shift from solely relying on petitioning the judiciary for equality, as the movement did in the first three decades, to engaging directly with political parties to integrate queer rights into the mainstream.

The 2024 Indian Parliamentary election in Shillong – the capital city of the northeastern state of Meghalaya and the parliamentary constituency for the Khasi and Jaintia Hills – was a contest between two main regional parties in the state – the ruling National People's Party and the nascent Voice of the People Party, a party that stood for ‘clean’ politics and the interests of the ‘jaidbynriew’– an often-used word in the campaigns across parties in the 2024 elections –loosely translated as the Khasi/Jaintia race or tribe, the pride and essence of being. The filmmaker – an insider-outsider in the Shillong of today – explores this tussle between parties and ideas of identity, to examine his own relationship with the place and ideas of belonging and otherness.

Sangama is a compelling portrait of democracy in action in a Southern Indian State. It chronicles the campaign of ‘Eddelu Karnataka’ [Wake-up Karnataka], as it unites citizens’ groups nation-wide to fight the majoritarian force, that has ruled unopposed for a decade.

In Bihar’s Nalanda, a young leader rises from the grassroots, challenging entrenched powers with limited resources but unwavering determination. His spirited efforts inspire hope and stand as a reminder that the contest for leadership is not merely about gaining power, but is a deeper struggle - a fight to have a voice and to reshape the future from the margins.

Historian and political theorist Partha Chatterjee worked in Calcutta and New York for 24 years between 1997 and 2021. Beginning with the Princely Impostor? (2002), all the books he wrote in the period drew something from the two cities. He taught a semester every year at Columbia University, but never left Calcutta to take up residence anywhere else. The film tries to capture in six episodes a thinker in relation to the cities he has inhabited, and to the place he calls his home. Its recurrent image is walking. The film talks about Chatterjee’s books, but also refugees and football, friends and neighbourhoods.

The partition of India in 1947 along religious lines, resulted in the division of one of world’s largest ethnolinguistic communities - the Bengalis. Fast forward to present day Australia, where immigrant Bengalis from Bangladesh and India, strive to bridge the divide by staging Rabindranath Tagore’s famous play ‘Achalayatan’ that talks about the liberation of our fettered minds.

Standing tall at 94, Jayanta Mahapatra - the grand old bard of Indian Poetry, finally gave the nod to be filmed for a documentary by Bishweshwar Das, a Cuttack resident and adman. A very private person like J D Salinger, Jayanta Da had however one condition, ‘Not to make a linear, and usual...was born in kind of film. JM as people fondly call him had once tinkered with analogue cameras and had ambitions of being a photographer, so when filming began JM slowly blended with his natural camaraderie and simplicity.

Four years after cycling 2,000 km home during the Covid lockdown, a young worker stars in a film about his journey. But where does he return to, when the shoot ends? This film-within-a-film blends fact, fiction, and cinema’s cold gaze.

Bombay Triptych I reflects on the nature of Indo-Catholic visual culture of Bombay through encounters with artists in the spaces and materials they work with. The first part analyses the form of labour involved in the creation process of religious figurines, statues and new churches through a meeting with Sr. Vimala, a nun from Kerala, from a family of traditional wood workers is a sacred artist based in Bombay working for the last four decades in a variety of mediums but particularly with architecture, stained glass, fibreglass and terracotta. She reflects on the process of Indo-catholic art through the intermixing of divine worship and material composition.

Amid the dominance of majoritarian politics, Muslim representation in Indian politics has declined; yet, AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi has expanded his influence. Seen by some as a champion of Muslim rights and by others as a polarizing figure serving the ruling party’s narrative, his rise reflects the complex dynamics of identity politics.

In a landscape of shifting sands, a community enclosed into grids with no name, just a number, rehearses its music in villages like 1 PB, a dot in the Thar desert, at the Indian side of the India-Pakistan border. This landscape is home to Mirs, a muslim community who are the custodians of a timeless poetry, and practitioners of a music not bound to 'quam' (religion) or 'desh' (nation). But the land has now degraded, boundaries have hardened and the music has become a whisper. This film gleans songs and poems to stitch a portrait of a group of musicians struggling to keep their inheritance of Islamic Sufi and Hindu Bhakti music alive.

State of Hope follows the 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign of Dr. T.M. Thomas Isaac, the Left Democratic Front candidate in Pathanamthitta, Kerala. Dr. Isaac has been working in Pathanamthitta since 2021, after two terms as the Finance Minister of Kerala. The film explores his election manifesto which focuses on employment generation, organic farming, women’s enterprise, waste management, palliative care and other initiatives for people’s empowerment. Through his campaign, the film also addresses the contemporary political scenario in India, such as Centre-state relations, and the political participation of marginalised communities in an era of rising inequality. The film portrays the uniqueness of Kerala as a state, given its history of social movements and civil society organisations.

"Immersed in moving his puppets, make them dance, cry, laugh, Madhab has lost the grip over his realities. Now as he helplessly witnesses the fast fading popularity of his puppet theatres and his own team is nearly defunct, Madhab fears that he is heading towards obscurity. Putulnama (Dolls Don’t Die) chronicles the battles and dreams of a man who is caught between the rugged realities and the ecstasies of a passionate artist."

This documentary captures the plight of Munda Adivasis in Similipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha whose lives were turned upside down in the name of tiger conversation. It shows the people's everyday struggle, who have been forcefully evicted from their ancestral village.