Kerala Diary: Reflections from the 30th IFFK
Attending the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala offered more than a survey of contemporary Malayalam cinema. It revealed a festival shaped by political tensions, cultural contradictions, and a distinctive cinephile public. This diary, written by FIPRESCI juror Christopher Small, reflects on how cinema, ideology, and lived experience intersected in Thiruvananthapuram.
I arrived in Kerala carrying a number of assumptions, both political and cinematic. From the moment I became interested in Indian cinema, knowledgeable friends—Indian and non-Indian alike—had confidently advised me that Malayalam cinema was where the most vital discoveries were to be found. Spoken in the reverent tones that thrill a young cinephile, this guidance encompassed not only masters of Indian parallel cinema from Kerala, such as John Abraham and Govindan Aravindan, whose work I would only encounter years later in China, but also contemporary productions. Recent Malayalam films, I was told, operated according to distinct rhythmic and political logics that set them apart from much of mainstream Indian cinema.
Subsequent exploration largely confirmed this promise. Yet, with the exception of a handful of key works, the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) interested me less as a site of cinematic discovery than as a cultural event through which the tensions of Malayali society—and Indian society more broadly—were refracted. In earlier editions, such as 2022, the festival had hosted major premieres like Like an Afternoon Dream (Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, 2022, Lijo Jose Pellissery). This year, however, films such as Desire (Moham, 2024, Fazil Razak), a melodrama centred on an abused wife navigating mental illness and criminal entanglements, or If on a Winter’s Night (Khidki Gaav, 2024, Sanju Surendran), which follows a Malayali couple struggling against precarity and hierarchy after relocating to Delhi, stood out primarily for the social frictions they articulated rather than for formal innovation alone.
Late one night, standing by the roadside at 2 a.m., drinking tea poured through a hole in a wall, several of my assumptions about cinephile hierarchies were quietly dismantled. Figures I had assumed to be canonically revered provoked unexpected reactions. Béla Tarr, Hungarian filmmaker, had reportedly been met with a notably frosty response at IFFK 2022 following remarks on Hungarian communism, while Kim Ki-duk, South Korean director, remains an influential reference point locally. I had hoped to visit the unofficially named “Kim Ki-duk Grills Café” on the city’s outskirts, but time did not allow it. What was unmistakable, however, was the intensity of the festival audience: packed cinemas, spectators rushing to films unlikely ever to receive commercial distribution, and, less pleasantly, frustrated crowds pounding on cinema doors when screenings were sold out.
In Thiruvananthapuram, I also finally encountered A River Called Titas (Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, 1970, Ritwik Ghatak) in a restored theatrical screening. The experience was overwhelming and clarifying. Ritwik Ghatak, Bengali filmmaker and Marxist intellectual, directed the film as a Bangladeshi–Indian co-production in the immediate aftermath of the 1969 genocide in Bengal carried out by the Pakistani army. Despite its engagement with post-independence modernity, the film carries the weight of an ancient epic. Watching it underscored how easily even committed viewers flatten “India” and “Indian cinema” into misleadingly unified concepts.
The day before the screening, a 20-year-old festival volunteer excitedly described the films assigned in her communications class: Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948, Vittorio De Sica) and, as she put it, “a Bengali movie,” Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray). The casual specificity of that description struck me. Knowing Ray’s stature did little to mitigate how revealing it was: the subcontinent’s cinema, if it can be spoken of as a single entity at all, only multiplies in complexity the closer one looks.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jean-Luc Godard, French-Swiss filmmaker, received the IFFK Lifetime Achievement Award, appearing online from his studio in Rolle for an extended discussion of his work. I had long assumed that securing a 90-minute appearance from the famously reclusive Godard owed something to Kerala’s reputation as a communist stronghold within India. Whether or not that was the case, Kerala’s political contradictions—its blend of ideological commitment and cultural plurality—undoubtedly made it a compelling site for a filmmaker attuned to such tensions.
Those contradictions were visible everywhere. Travelling from the airport, one could not miss the rows of red flags bearing hammer-and-sickle insignia, remnants of recent municipal elections in which Narendra Modi, Indian prime minister and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had secured a surprise victory in Thiruvananthapuram. These symbols coexisted with Kerala’s striking religious diversity: mosques, Catholic churches, and Sikh, Jain, and Hindu temples, alongside banners proclaiming the state “God’s Own Country”—a slogan variously attributed to a 1980s tourism campaign or to Hermann Gundert, German linguist and missionary, as claimed by Germany’s ambassador at the festival opening.
Politics at the IFFK was not abstract. At the opening ceremony, Philipp Ackermann, German Ambassador to India, received polite but restrained applause when mentioning German films in the programme. Moments later, Abdullah M. Abu Shawesh, Palestinian Ambassador to India, was met with thunderous cheers as he spoke at length about occupation, oppression, and genocide, in connection with the opening film, Palestine 36 (2025, Annemarie Jacir).
Within days, the political stakes became explicit. Screenings were abruptly cancelled. A planned showing of Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein) disappeared from the schedule. Soon it emerged that India’s central government had denied censorship exemptions to 19 films.
In response, Kerala’s left-led state government, closely aligned with the festival, authorised the IFFK to defy the directive and proceed with the screenings. Watching this confrontation unfold—against the backdrop of India’s increasingly nationalist political climate—lent renewed urgency to the role of film festivals as sites of resistance. The episode demonstrated how censorship, if accepted, is corrosive not only to art but to public life itself.
For viewers accustomed to Europe’s relative insulation from such interventions, the experience was a reminder that screening films remains a political act. At the IFFK, that reality was neither theoretical nor symbolic. It was immediate, embodied, and impossible to ignore.
Christopher Small
©FIPRESCI 2026