The 31st Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF), held from 6–13 November 2025, unfolded a vibrant celebration of world cinema, affirming Kolkata’s enduring love of the moving image. The festival presented a rich spectrum of films — from timeless classics that revisited cinematic heritage, to powerful displacement and migration narratives exploring the pain and hope of uprooted lives. KIFF also included engaging environmental films confronting the planet’s ecological and biodiversity crises. Together, these categories fostered a multiplicity of voices and multilayered interpretations, revealing cinema’s ability to bridge time, geography, and ideology. Through diverse storytelling and cinematic languages, the festival illuminated the complex intersections of memory, trauma, and survival, reaffirming its essence and evocative tagline— “Where Cinema Connects the World.”
Filmmakers, critics, and audiences across continents united by a shared belief in cinema’s power to inspire dialogue and change. Showcasing a rich and compelling lineup of socially engaging films across borders, KIFF 31 foregrounded voices that challenged inequality, questioned authority, and illuminated the resilience of the indomitable and indefatigable human spirit. The festival was a week-long, fascinating viewing experience, where every frame seemed to speak across borders, where every frame transformed the theatres of Kolkata into spaces of empathy, awareness, and creative solidarity.
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Exhibitions and academic seminars were organised to pay tribute to the Centenarians: Ritwik Ghatak, Pradip Kumar, Guru Dutt, Santosh Dutta, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Richard Burton and Wojciech Has and others along with screenings of films of Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Ajoy Kar among several other Indian directors. This write-up, however, will focus on selected International Competition: Innovation in Moving Images and Cinema International categories (World Cinema, outside India) in KIFF this year.
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On 8 November, Franz was screened at Nandan 1. This year, Polish cinema was the festival’s focus. Director Agnieszka Holland deploys a subtle yet rigorous cinematic language that deepens the film’s psychological and historical complexity. The director frames the protagonist’s fractured consciousness and the moral disquiet that defines post-war Europe. Fragmented cuts, temporal jump, use of chiaroscuro, and overlapping memories blur the boundary between past and present, reminding us of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour. A Kafkaesque exploration of guilt, exile, and identity, Holland shows how Kafka’s sensibility lingers on every frame of Franz.
On 9 November, The Condor Daughter was screened. Set in the high Andes of Bolivia, the film narrates the story of Clara and her adopted mother Ana, who is a traditional Quechua midwife. Poetry is inherent in director Alvaro Olmos Torrico’s storytelling. Song and soundscape emerge as fascinating radars of storytelling, and Clara’s ritualistic tunes rhetorically render the melody of a Quechua community. Torrico foregrounds a community that is threatened by the clash of tradition and modernity. Clouds and mountains, capturing majestic Andean landscapes, are breathtaking, and Clara’s songs during midwifery rituals are symbolic of a cultural inheritance.
Francois Ozon’s The Stranger, based on Albert Camus’ 1942 novel, was screened on 9 November. Built on a restrained cinematic language of estrangement, the film’s technique, often reminiscent of film noir, deepens the film’s engagement with ambiguity and duplicity. Shot entirely in black and white, Ozon constructs his main character (Benjamin Voisin as Mersault) not as a conventional hero but as a mirror reflecting human contradictions: guilt and innocence, desire and repression, the stranger’s detachment, and a quiet yearning for connection. Benjamin Voisin (Mersault’s) silences and measured gestures heighten the psychological depth of the film.
On 9 November, Luc Besson’s Dracula (2025) was screened. The romantic, fantasy film revisits the popular Dracula myth through a romantic and postmodern lens where desire becomes both a salvation and a curse. Drawing upon Bram Stoker’s 1897 fiction and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film adaptation, Besson transforms the Dracula figure into an emblem of loss and unfulfilled desire. Love becomes an aesthetic obsession in this visually rich intertext. Visual excess, postmodern iconography, combined with the poetics of 19th-century Romanticism, define the visual grammar of Besson’s adaptation. The perfume motif aligns vampirism with eternal desire rather than monstrosity. Though we are reminded of Gary Oldman’s Count Dracula, the new Caleb Landry Jones’s Count is equally powerful in his portrayal of immortality as entrapment.
A film from Kazakhstan, Entrapment, was screened on 10 November. The visual grammar—its shot composition, cross-cutting, close-ups, point of view shots, and mise-en-scene are the key to its meaning. In its chaos and silence, Farkhat Sharipov creates a heart-touching cinematic language of rupture and enduring, of displacement and exile, of home and homelessness. Evacuation transforms individual despair into collective memory, and the director’s camera refuses to cut away, letting time accumulate around its visual metaphors. This gem of a creation by Sharipov is a reflective journey on memory, loss, and collective survival of people from the regions of the erstwhile USSR at the risk of Nazi occupation. The director’s austerity recalls Tarkovsky’s visual ethics of witnessing—pain must be seen, pain must be felt, not dramatised. Evacuation relies on such a grammar of motion and stillness.
The scene where little Gallya is lost in a railway station and clings to the lamppost, crying “Mom”, is one of the most emotionally charged sequences of Evacuation. Natalya’s expression of grief, portrayed by Natalia Witmer, is powerful and visually evocative.
Scarecrow, co-directed by Babak Behdad and Houchang Allahyari (10 November), uses simplicity of form to expose the deep fractures of Iranian society. It tells the story of Lida, whose artistic freedom is curbed by her father and the silent burying of desire. Her playing of the scarecrow in a distant land is a metaphor of what she suppresses. The film is a deep psychological study of repression, Lida’s symbolic relationship with her new landscape, fractured identity, and the complexities of the human mind.
Late Fame, directed by Kent Jones, was screened on 10 November. It meditates on the vanity of artistic life and the melancholy of late recognition. It narrates the story of a minor poet, Edward Saxberger, long forgotten by the literary world. When a group of young writers rediscovers his early book, Saxberger begins to assimilate with that group. As the young artists attempt to relaunch the career of Saxberger, the disillusioned modern-day elderly poet realises the futility of earthly glory, fame, and recognition.
Mountains of Fire, directed by Jayro Bustamante, screened on 11 November, follows two volcanologists who visit indigenous communities in Guatemala to warn of an upcoming volcanic eruption. The film uncovers the government’s neglect of marginalised, indigenous groups. A multi-layered, environmental film that intelligently negates the “disaster movie” cliché, exposes the discrimination against minority communities, their beliefs and practices, as it foregrounds state neglect, corruption, and ethnic marginalisation.
The Italian drama film La Grazia (11 November) follows the last few years of the fictional widowed President Mariano De Santis. Much of the film is about his personal grief, his inner conflicts, while he grapples with life and death decisions and is unable to decide on whether to legalize euthanasia. Paolo Sorrentino’s film allows space for introspection and builds on the interior monologues of Mariano, often rendered through reflective voice-overs. His monologues are an encounter with his alter ego. These monologues expose the hollowness of the performance of power and expose the human frailties beneath the political and public spectacle.
Riverstone, a Sri Lankan road movie (12 November), exposes the rapacity that sustains corridors of power. Three police officers escort a suspect to his village and assassinate him as orders to eliminate him come from higher authorities. A searing critique of systemic corruption, director Lalith Rathnayake’s biting and gritty realism becomes an indictment of a “system” that conceals networks of greed and gluttony.
Ana’s character in A Land Within, a Germany-Italy-Austria co-production, directed by Michael Kofler (12 November), allows the film to probe gender roles, power dynamics, and how violence intersects with masculinity in a small village context. The film situates itself in a volatile moment of South Tyrol’s history, a period of separatist bomb attacks and social tensions in the German-speaking minority region under Italian administration. It is a profoundly reflective family drama set against a period of historical and social turmoil from the filmmaker’s local perspective.
Tales of the Wounded Land (12 November) documents a “heap of broken images” but not as a mere backdrop. Every fractured wall, collapsed roof, broken homes, handheld shots contribute to the way the film communicates trauma, memory and survival in the aftermath of the 2023-24 Israeli air strikes on southern Lebanon (around Nabatieh) and follows the director’s Abbas Fahdel and his own family, his wife and little daughter returning to the devastated ruins to talk to the survivors.
On the last day, 13 November, a documentary, Ghost Elephants, directed and narrated by the legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog, was screened. These giant elephants are symbolic of a wounded ecosystem and threatened biodiversity. Herzog’s film, on the closing day, offered a layered reflection on the Namibian marginalized community, their struggles, aligning with the festival’s socially engaged vision, offering further reflection on coexistence, extinction, and the fragile ethics of remembrance.
The writer is Associate Professor in English and Coordinator of Film Studies at Vidyasagar College for Women, University of Calcutta.
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