Redrawing India’s cinematic future

As the 56th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) came to a close in Goa, there was a sense that something larger than the event itself had just taken place. Not just a celebration of cinema, but a redefinition of what India means to the world of storytelling. The applause that rang out during the closing ceremony wasn’t only for the award winners or the mesmerising cultural performances. It was for the quiet but unmistakable realisation that Indian cinema, in all its chaotic, colourful, multilingual glory, is no longer knocking on the door of the global stage, it has already walked in. Over nine days, the festival transformed Goa into a pulsating creative laboratory.

From the majestic red-carpet arrivals to the spontaneous, soul-stirring conversations between filmmakers from Iran and Assam, Slovenia and Kerala, it was a reminder that cinema continues to be one of the rare forces that can hold contradictions, commercial and experimental, local and global, ancient and futuristic, within a single frame. What made IFFI 2025 unforgettable wasn’t just its scale, or even its selection of films. It was the confidence with which India projected itself. Not as a country seeking approval, but as a country defining the terms of engagement.

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Take, for instance, the WAVES Film Bazaar, which this year generated a staggering Rs 1,050 crore in business. This isn’t merely a record, it’s a statement. India is no longer just a location for film shoots or a market for finished products. It’s a co-production powerhouse, a breeding ground for emerging talent, and an investment-worthy ecosystem for anyone looking to bet on the future of global entertainment. With participation from over 77 countries, WAVES positioned India as a serious player not only in content creation but in the business of culture. In a world rapidly turning to soft power as a marker of geopolitical influence, this matters more than we acknowledge.

And yet, the business deals, the market numbers, and the pitch sessions were only part of the story. The emotional centre of IFFI 2025 lay in the stories being told and the storytellers being discovered. The Golden Peacock went to Skin of Youth, a Vietnamese film that dared to be tender and confrontational in the same breath. Santosh Davakhar’s Marathi gem Gondhal felt like an ode to the oral traditions of India’s heartland while pulsating with the structure and surprise of modern theatre. Meanwhile, Karan Singh Tyagi’s Kesari Chapter 2 showed that even mainstream Indian stories could compete on the merit of vision and voice. This collision of cultures, genres, and perspectives, curated with care, not just diversity for diversity’s sake, was proof that IFFI is curating possibility.

This edition also did something that most festivals hesitate to do: it blended legacy with innovation, emotion with technology. While the world paid homage to cinematic legends like Dharmendra and Rajinikanth, whose 50-year reign in Indian cinema was celebrated with thunderous applause, IFFI boldly planted its feet into the future. The AI Film Festival and CinemAI Hackathon weren’t just footnotes; they were provocations. They asked what happens when storytelling and machine intelligence collide, not to replace human creativity, but to expand its vocabulary. For young creators, this wasn’t theoretical. It was an invitation to reimagine the act of filmmaking itself.

And with the launch of the Indian Institute of Creative Technology (IICT) in Mumbai, that reimagination now has an institutional anchor. India isn’t just nurturing its film-makers, it’s training its future disruptors. What emerged most clearly was a deeper ideological shift. For the first time, perhaps, IFFI felt less like a mirror reflecting global cinema trends and more like a prism refracting Indian ones. Fifty films by women directors weren’t programmed as a special category, they were the main event. Accessibility wasn’t an afterthought, it was embedded, from Indian Sign Language interpreters to divyang-friendly measures across the festival.

The spirit of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam was not simply echoed in speeches, it was visible in the warmth with which filmmakers from Estonia and Iran, Slovenia and Nigeria, were embraced, engaged, and elevated. There was also something poetic about how the programming honoured the centenary legacies of visionaries like Guru Dutt, Raj Khosla, and Ritwik Ghatak, even as it introduced new voices whose names we may be hearing for the next hundred years. IFFI didn’t just screen films, it held space for memory. In a world racing to the next scroll, the next trend, the next dopamine hit, this festival dared to slow down. It invited us to linger. To sit still inside a story.

To breathe with a character, to ache for an ending, to remember. That in itself felt radical. In a time when content is consumed faster than it’s made, here was a place that asked nothing of us but attention, and gave back emotion in return. Every frame was a pause. Every applause, a collective exhale. And in the quiet between the lights and the language, something else became clear: IFFI 2025 did not just position India on the global cinema map; it changed how the world orientated itself towards Indian storytelling. Not as a moment of curiosity or a cultural detour, but as a destination. For decades, partnerships with India were often transactional or tinted with exoticism. We were the location, the backdrop, the colour palette.

But now, those frames are shifting. India is stepping in not just as a collaborator, but as a co-creator, someone who has equal skin in the game, equal imagination, equal ownership. And the magic of this shift isn’t confined to glossy studios or scripted boardrooms. It’s happening in writing rooms in Bhopal and editing suites in Trivandrum, in the minds of students in Pune and storytellers in Shillong. Something sacred is moving. And it’s moving forward. The hunger, raw, restless, radiant, was visible on the faces of young CMOT creators pitching their stories to global producers. It echoed in the applause for Bandish Bandits Season 2 winning Best OTT Series, a homegrown show that made classical music mainstream again.

And it was perhaps most visible in the silence that followed the screening of A Useful Ghost, the haunting Thai film that closed the festival. As the credits rolled, the room stayed quiet. Not because it was unsure how to react, but because it knew it had just witnessed something unforgettable. That’s what IFFI did. It reminded us that cinema still has the power to leave us speechless. So, what does all this mean for the future? It means that India is no longer emerging, it has emerged. Not just as a market or a location, but as a lens through which the world will increasingly want to see itself. It means that Indian creators are not just inheriting a legacy, they are inventing one. The curtain may have fallen on IFFI 2025, but its echoes will reverberate for years. In the deals signed, the stories seeded, the collaborations initiated, and in the quiet revolution of a nation ready to tell its story not just to itself, but to the world.

IFFI in its future edition needs to position the five mantras guiding cinema globally – Collaboration, C o op eration, C o ordination, Convergence and Cohesion, the hub for creativity, global impression offering the shades of soft-power impact on the festival landscape. IFFI needs to reinforce fresh thinking, perspectives and a new stream of narrative building and knowledge sharing. The 57th edition of IFFI should keep in mind the objective of placing its influence on hearts and minds of cinephiles, giving a bigger push to quality, character and relatability of movies in the film festival circuit. It needs to carry forward the global impact of the “Namaste Gesture” of Oscars in 2025, giving the world a new mantra of inclusivity and the platform to bring creators and creativity together.

(The writer is former Additional DG, DFF and Festival Director, IFFI. Inputs were provided by Zoya Ahmad and Vaishnavie Srinivasan. Views are personal.)