Rooftops to community centres, films find alternative spaces

At the fifth edition of the P.K. Rosy Film Festival that concluded in Chennai earlier this month to commemorate Dalit History Month, a few unfamiliar faces hovered around the venue. They were neither delegates queuing for screenings nor filmmakers engaging with audiences. Instead, they occupied corners quietly, stepping in and out of screening halls, sitting through panel discussions, lacking the curiosity of cinephiles.

Festival organisers knew who they were. “They were there not to watch films but to observe,” says Vasugi Bhaskar, event coordinator of the festival and of Neelam Cultural Centre, which organises the festival each year. Bhaskar says that these attendees—representatives from the local government and police in civilian clothes—were present to scrutinise what was being shown and said. “They were monitoring if any film or discussion challenged the majoritarian ideology or depicted oppression—gender, caste, Dalit—in ways they found objectionable.” If it did, an interruption might have been a possible outcome, he adds.

It is the political nature of the festival—not only in its intent, but also name—that perhaps invited this level of scrutiny, he says. Named after Malayalam cinema’s first female actor and a Dalit woman, P.K. Rosy faced violent backlash for portraying a character from an upper caste in Vigathakumaran in the late 1920s. “Naming the festival after her is a statement in itself,” says Bhaskar of the festival that is helmed by filmmaker Pa Ranjith, a Dalit himself. The resistance, Bhaskar argues, is not merely in the content of the films, but in the insistence that Dalit stories deserve public celebration rather than marginal screening. And this visibility, he adds, has its share of repercussions.

This year’s edition was rather measured in its tonality. “We learnt a bitter lesson last year,” he says. “We carefully curated the festival this year, so as to not invite any disruption.” Last April, the festival was unable to screen Santosh (2024). “Certain organisations pressured the state,” Bhaskar says, “and venue owners, fearing risk, refused to host it.” The same fate awaited Arun Karthick’s Nasir, the story of a Muslim salesman set against the backdrop of the rising Hindutva tide. “The programming is the most difficult part. We know there are certain movies that won't be allowed to exhibit at all,” he adds.

When Dalit-centric films show protagonists rise and resist, the festival goers erupt in an applause, he says. And it is this applause that unsettles some. “Therefore, when a film festival expresses its political stance in its name and programming so explicitly, disruption is inevitable,” he says.

As a result, films are withdrawn last minute, venues refuse to host screenings, and lineups are revised mid-festival. It’s a pattern seen in other parts of the country as well.

Take Kerala for example. The fourth day of the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in Thiruvananthapuram late last year (12-19 December 2025) had a familiar energy: cinephiles clutching schedule catalogues, delegates exchanging recommendations, and serpentine queues at theatre entrances. Then, almost collectively, phones beeped. A message landed on WhatsApp.

The screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic, Battleship Potemkin, restored for its centenary, was cancelled as the title hadn’t received censor exemption. Films showcased at festivals in India, unlike commercial theatrical releases, are exempt from a Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) certificate. However, a “censor exemption” from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) is still mandatory.

Resul Pookutty, chairperson and festival director, recalls a conversation with an official who was concerned that the festival curation had a “leftist narrative”. Pookutty continues, “This shows how little the official knows about cinema.” Later, another title was stalled, Spanish film Beef, centred on the underground rap scene. Organisers suspected that the title, not its subject matter, may have spooked officials. Pookutty, an Oscar-winning sound designer, was hoping for a routine administrative procedure: submit films two weeks before the commencement of the festival (an established timeline), and receive bulk exemptions, largely granted after browsing through synopses instead of actual screenings. “Permissions began to trickle down in batches. In the end, six films did not receive censor exemptions.”

But Kerala’s state culture minister instructed organisers to proceed with a few changes. The printed schedules had to be reshuffled in real time as exemptions were delayed, forcing organisers to issue constant updates to delegates on screenings and venues, often at the last minute as clearances came through mid-festival.

For decades, most battles have played out at the CBFC (or censor board) office. Today, the festival circuit isn’t exempt and now, some films are also invisibilised by streaming platforms. Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees, which follows a Kashmiri Muslim family across three generations, is an example. Commissioned by Netflix in 2019 and completed in 2022, it was shelved by the streaming platform. Banerjee believes that the backlash against Amazon Prime Video’s Tandav in 2021 made the executives anxious. “Little did we know that the incident would reframe how streaming services decide which content the public should and should not consume.”

However, Banerjee’s searing portrait found an unlikely audience on a rooftop in Delhi a few months ago. When the screening ended at Delhi’s NIV Art Centre, the rooftop was buzzing with conversations, heated exchanges and laughter. “This is exactly what a filmmaker hopes for. Not reverence, but this recognition,” says Banerjee. For Banerjee, showing Tees outside of the streaming platform was a practical response, a way to “find ways to still keep expressing yourself on platforms that are not dependent on the data-mining corporate machinery, and the state.”

The screening was a part of “And Cinema Goes On,” a three-day festival planned by film curator Labanya Dey. Grappling with themes of political pressure and censorship, the festival’s first edition included films from Iran and Palestine such as This Is Not a Film, an Iranian documentary by Jafar Panahi made while he was under house arrest, and Palestinian-Israeli documentary, No Other Land that was pulled from MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and the Dharamshala International Film Festival in 2024.

Dey says that reaching out to filmmakers was the easiest part. “When a film is not made publicly accessible by removing its official pathway, it finds its own way to people.”

Across India, filmmakers and curators are devising a parallel cinema exhibition network. Chalchitra Abhiyaan, a film and media collective that trains young people from marginalised communities to tell their own stories through video, is based in Kandhla in Shamli district of Uttar Pradesh. Their film screenings draw crowds of over 100 people every week. With a projector, speakers and makeshift screens, the team screens films in village choupals (traditional community spaces where panchayat meetings are held), with volunteers translating live by reading directly from film scripts, as they did for the Iranian film, Children of Heaven, because most villagers cannot read subtitles. Founder and filmmaker Nakul Singh Sawhney says, “Such screenings facilitate debate,” he says.

During the screening of Anand Patwardhan’s film on communal violence, Ram Ke Naam, electricity was cut mid-film, nudged by local political groups in 2022. Yet, Sawhney stays unperturbed. Recalling screenings of his own film Izzatnagari ki Asabhya Betiyan and Nagraj Manjules’s Sairat to a tense audience shortly after an honour killing shook a neighbouring village, he says, “Both movies centre on honour killings. These movies unsettled viewers,” he says, “but that too is a good thing.”

Documentary filmmaker Kasturi Basu, who co-founded People’s Film Collective (PFC) in 2013 in Kolkata, says, “Bengal’s film society movement had a rich past, but it had always ignored the documentary form,” she says. However, as the political environment changed, documentary filmmakers rose to the occasion to witness and resist, but without any clear channel to reach audiences. For Basu, staying non-sponsored and non-corporate is not simply a matter of ideology, but existence. “Free and open to all” is non-negotiable for the collective to retain autonomy over their line-up.

Delhi’s rooftops, Shamli's choupals, Chennai’s community spaces and Kolkata’s festivals have one thing in common: movie-watching as a democratic practice. Some filmmakers simply upload their films on YouTube but online circulation cannot replace the communal energy of watching urgent movies together. Though these rooms may not replace mainstream distribution, they are keeping some films from disappearing entirely.

Viren Naidu is a Mumbai-based independent journalist focused on deeply reported stories about gender, politics, culture and social justice in South Asia.