International Film Festival Of Kerala 2025: Unavoidable Politics And Uneasy Truths

Chilean director Pablo Larraín, one of the chief guests of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), remarked during his masterclass that politics in cinema is “unavoidable”: “Every film, even the most intimate or entertaining, presents a vision of society and is therefore political.” And the 30th edition of the film festival seemed determined to take this statement not as a mere metaphor.

Organised by the Chalachitra Academy from December 12 to 19 at Thiruvananthapuram, IFFK’s tone was set right from the opening ceremony. A fiery speech by the invited ambassador of Palestine announced a special programme dedicated to Palestinian cinema, accompanied by emphatic expressions of solidarity with the people of Gaza, culminating in the screening of Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36. It was an opening heavy with declarations and intention. And, as it turned out, only a modest prelude to what followed over the next week.

19 films, including the opening title, were initially denied screening by the Union government due to missing censorship exemptions. The list bordered on the absurd: contemporary Palestinian films shared the blacklist with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin from 1925, the canonical Argentinian documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and even a contemporary Spanish film reportedly flagged for nothing more than its title, Beef. An unusually public standoff ensued between the festival, backed by the Kerala government, and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, producing a wave of cancellations, rescheduling and nervous queue-watching. In the end, most films were cleared and screened after frantic juggling, with only six left permanently sidelined. Depending on whom you ask, this was a modest victory over censorship, a weak compromise, heinous conspiracy or simply the result of bureaucratic incompetence and “procedural lapses”, made worse by a turbulent overhaul of the festival’s management in 2024–25, complete with an absent chairman and a conspicuously missing position of artistic director for this edition. All explanations felt equally plausible.

Yet, one of the films at the centre of the controversy, the opening title Palestine 36, unintentionally exposed the most painful gap in the festival’s political posture: the distance between intention and articulation. IFFK’s long-standing disregard for documentary cinema felt particularly outdated this year, when documentary remains the most immediate and powerful form for addressing ongoing catastrophes, whether in Gaza or Ukraine. However sincere Annemarie Jacir’s aims were—to foreground Arab and indigenous perspectives during the first wave of European Jewish settlement in the late 1930s—the film ultimately struggled to find an adequate cinematic language. Watching it produced a lingering sense of unease, as if fiction itself had arrived a step behind history, unable to fully engage with a wound that is still bleeding.

Of course, none of this was the whole story. The IFFK programme, true to form, remained vast and unapologetically sprawling, with Indian films jostling against weighty retrospectives, restored classics, and a relentless stream of international festival favourites. The schedule was as dense as ever and with sufficient disregard for food, sleep, and basic biological needs, one could still manage six films a day. If you find yourself watching Indonesian horror at midnight after waking up at 7 a.m. and standing in queues from 8:30, you may be dangerously close to attaining cinephilic nirvana.

Where the festival most consistently delivered pure cinematic joy was in its retrospectives. A century of Youssef Chahine and Ritwik Ghatak unfolded alongside The Turin Horse (2011), Jaws (1975) and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Call it nostalgic or retrograde if you like, but at certain moments the conclusion felt unavoidable: these films remain overpowering in ways that very little in 2025 manages to be. Whether it was the closing dance of 8½ (1963) set to Nino Rota’s score, the eerie “In Dreams” sequence in Blue Velvet (1986), the wry Czech anti-fascist irony of Closely Watched Trains (1966), or the rare chance to see Chahine’s playful, Fellini-inflected Alexandria: Again and Forever (1989) on the big screen, the impact was undiminished. Not all restorations, however, inspired gratitude. Cairo Station (1958), scrubbed into gleaming perfection, revived a familiar unease around digital restoration, where excessive cleanliness, blinding whites and erased grain begin to feel less like preservation and more like vandalism, flattening cinema into a suffocating sequence of pristine set pieces, however undeniable the film’s greatness.

Returning to the present and the competition itself, the main prize went to Japanese filmmaker Sho Miyake for Two Seasons, Two Strangers. This year’s competition felt comparatively modest, even restrained, and the outcome was unsurprising. A deserved victory, yes, but one that arrived already pre-approved by the film’s earlier triumph in Locarno. Miyake’s film operates less through narrative propulsion than through accumulation and observation. Two temporal blocks, two emotional climates, loosely mirror each other around a solitary writer figure. Its pleasures lie in repetition, variation and an acute attentiveness to duration: long takes, minor gestures, pauses stretched just beyond comfort. There is a discernible echo of Hong Sang-soo in its meta-games and quiet self-reflexivity, though stripped of irony and softened into something more contemplative. Firmly situated within the tradition of contemporary Asian slow cinema, the film feels like a cousin to the Chinese Gloaming in Luomu, sharing its fascination with temporality, alienation, empty spaces and the fragile search for human proximity and vulnerability.

Hong Sang-soo’s new film, What Does Nature Say to You, was there too. At this point, Hong feels less like a festival guest and more like a recurring natural phenomenon. He probably deserves festivals of his own, running year-round, where all his films play back to back, with the new one quietly appended each year like a footnote expanding an ever-growing continuum—possibly the only cinematic continuum that still feels necessary.

IFFK also functioned this year as practically the only national showcase for Indian cinema. Alongside already travelled titles like Cactus Pears, Bad Girl and Secret of a Mountain Serpent, there were quieter discoveries such as Shadowbox, which picked up the Best Debut award, and Tiger’s Pond from the director of Pedro (2021), a small but welcome reminder that festival memory does occasionally carry over from year to year.

Among local favourites, however, If on a Winter’s Night emerged as an awards darling, collecting both FIPRESCI and NETPAC prizes. The premise promises more than it delivers: a Malayalam couple relocating to Delhi could easily slip into a surreal horror of displacement, with the city as an alien organism. Instead, the film opts for timid realism. The leads share little chemistry and its sharpest observations amount to the universal unpleasantness of landlords and the revelation that winters are cold. Nearly every interaction is reduced to a transaction, as if money were the only remaining mode of communication available to its characters.

Once again, across the various sections, there was no shortage of female coming-of-age narratives. Unfortunately, quantity did not translate into variety. Many films felt formulaic and strangely interchangeable, competently circling familiar territory: growing up, inherited trauma, identity negotiated through queerness and friendship (Little Sister, Little Trouble Girls), or framed through sexual violence (Broken Voices). The latter raised particular discomfort, not least because it was directed by a man and lacked the restraint of the earlier titles, lingering in an extended depiction of abuse that felt less interrogative than centred as a grim focal point. More engaging was the Argentine The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, which approaches similar emotional material through genre, filtering first love, jealousy and heartbreak through horror and dark comedy—not groundbreaking, perhaps, but at least memorable within the crowded field of festival coming-of-age cinema. A similar case could be made for the Vietnamese Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024), which introduces unexpected magical shifts while tracing two generations of women within the same family.

Talking about major festival hits, The Secret Agent stood out sharply. Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers a complex, deliberately convoluted portrait of life under dictatorship—a film that avoids obvious cliché, while openly embracing quotation and transformation. It mutates constantly, shifting between detective story, road movie, political thriller, meditation on memory and loss and even a nostalgic lament for vanished cinema halls in the director’s hometown. At moments, grotesque intrusions of bodily violence rupture the fabric of the film, calling into question the very possibility of fictionalising traumatic history. The film repeatedly collapses the distinction between the monstrous and the mundane, suggesting that authoritarian regimes generate their own surrealism, their own warped sense of order. Less polished than One Battle After Another yet more restless, it refuses resolution as a matter of principle, using genre not to promise answers but to register the irreducible gaps in historical knowledge—the lives and voices that no archive can ever fully recover.

A similar logic underpins another significant film in the programme, The Mastermind by Kelly Reichardt, which, despite being already available digitally, passed almost unnoticed here, much as it did at IFFI. Framed as an anti-heist and a bitterly ironic, spiritual cousin of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), the film carries a sharper and more unsettling political charge. Its protagonist drifts through life in a state of cultivated disengagement, absorbed in small, selfish fantasies, largely detached from family, responsibility, or consequence. Reichardt, however, is not interested in this dream of individualism for its own sake. As the film quietly unfolds against a background of radio news about the Vietnam War and its expansion into Cambodia, politics remains deliberately peripheral, almost ambient, until the final moments, when it arrives with devastating clarity. What initially appears as historical setting reveals itself as the film’s core statement: politics does not announce itself as spectacle, but intrudes as blunt force. In a world structured by systemic violence, neutrality is exposed not as a moral stance, but as a fragile fantasy, available only to those the system has not yet reached.

Walking out of the screening after the film’s final scene and straight into celebrations marking the BJP’s historic local victory in Thiruvananthapuram, the parallel felt almost indecent. Art had anticipated life, but life, as usual, proved stranger than fiction: noise instead of a jazzy soundtrack, spectacle without irony. If IFFK at 30 proved anything, it was this uneasy truth: cinema may try to understand the world, but the world has little interest in its interpretations or metaphors. And on that point, Pablo Larraín was undoubtedly right.