IFFK turns 30 with a politically charged opening, ‘Palestine 36’ to inaugurate festival

The film follows Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), who moves between a quiet rural life and the charged streets of Jerusalem as the uprising unfolds. Through his personal journey, the film reconstructs a moment of political awakening and the seeds of confrontation in the region. Palestine 36 was awarded Best Film at the Tokyo International Film Festival and represented Palestine at the 98th Academy Awards in the International Feature Film category. In choosing the film as the opening title for its 30th edition, IFFK continues its practice of foregrounding cinema rooted in struggle and historical memory, thereby tying the art of filmmaking to questions of power.

The festival will also screen Jacir’s earlier film Wajib, which won IFFK’s Golden Crow Pheasant in 2017. The film, which is part of a retrospective package featuring titles that won the Suvarna Chakoram in early editions, constructs an intimate portrait of Palestinian life through a father-son relationship set against Ramallah’s social tensions.

The Palestinian package features three more powerful films. All That’s Left of You traces a family’s story across three generations since 1948 and was Jordan’s Oscar entry after premiering at Sundance. The Sea follows a Palestinian boy’s dangerous journey to see the Mediterranean and was Israel’s Oscar submission. Once Upon a Time in Gaza explores revenge in the 2007 Gaza context and won Best Director at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. It signals the festival’s continued engagement with Jacir’s work and, equally, IFFK’s long-standing approach of reading cinema as a site of political testimony.

World Cinema: 57 films mapping conflict, memory and identity

Marking its 30th year, IFFK has significantly expanded its World Cinema line-up, bringing 57 films from across continents. The section includes globally acclaimed titles that traverse themes of identity, familial conflict, survival, institutional violence and the aftermath of political rupture.

Also read: Dhurandhar review: Ranveer Singh’s tall act barely salvages the shallow spy thriller

The category brings together both newly celebrated auteurs and emerging voices. Hafsia Herzi’s Queer Palm-winning The Little Sister addresses identity and desire through a delicate, sensorial register. Robin Campillo’s Enzo explores class divisions through the eyes of a boy confronting the fragility of belonging. Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3, which won the Lisbon Special Jury Award, uses a haunting allegorical structure to examine trauma and the breakdown of trust.

Several titles navigate memory and familial rupture. Fatih Akin’s Amrum, Cole Webley’s Omaha and Hlynur Palmason’s The Love that Remains which is Iceland’s official Oscar entry, explore separation, exile and emotional reconstruction. Urška Djukić’s The Little Trouble Girls foregrounds the turbulence of adolescent girlhood, while Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’s Forastera examines grief through fractured landscapes of memory.

Institutional abuse forms the core of Goran Stanković’s Our Father, and the emotional violence of exclusion surfaces sharply in Morad Mostafa’s Aisha Can’t Fly Away. While the range is stylistically varied, the curatorial intent appears unified: cinema as a tool to interrogate our political and social worlds.

Female Focus: five films and a distinctive lens

This year’s Female Focus category continues the IFFK tradition of emphasising women auteurs. Five films directed by Kristen Stewart, Louise Hémon, Gaya Jiji, Paulene Loquès and Shu Qi address identity, resistance, magical realism and feminist self-definition. Stewart’s self-assured directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes, adapts Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir into a sensory, fragmented odyssey through trauma, writing, and embodied memory. The film’s visceral immersion in pain and language unsettles and expands the conventions of autobiographical cinema.

In Hémon’s debut The Girl in the Snow, a young republican schoolteacher arrives in an isolated alpine village at the turn of the 20th century and finds her rational ideals swallowed by local superstition and elemental forces. Jiji’s Pieces of a Foreign Life tracks a Syrian woman’s perilous flight to Bordeaux, balancing the quotidian grind of survival with the fractures of longing and intimacy. In Nino, Loquès’ restrained character study, a 29-year-old man diagnosed with throat cancer confronts identity, silence, and connection over an emotionally tense weekend in Paris. Taiwanese auteur Shu Qi’s coming-of-age drama, Girl follows its withdrawn protagonist in the late 1980s as she comes to terms with family trauma and the tentative power of female friendship.

Homage: remembering legends across generations

IFFK 2025 will also honour nine icons across world cinema in its Homage category, screening 11 works that trace both artistic legacy and historical influence. The section will feature films by David Lynch (Blue Velvet), Robert Redford (All the President’s Men), Claudia Cardinale (8½), Diane Keaton (Annie Hall), Shyam Benegal (Bhumika), M. T. Vasudevan Nair (Nirmalyam, Kadavu), Shaji N Karun (Vanaprastham, Kutty Srank), Vayalar Ramavarma (Chemmeen) and Guru Dutt (Pyaasa). The line-up resituates familiar classics into the festival’s memoryscape while acknowledging Malayalam cinema’s own foundational figures.

Vietnam in Focus: cinema and a century of resistance

The 30th edition designates Vietnam as the Country Focus section, marking 50 years since the Vietnam War and reflecting on the intertwined histories of anti-imperial struggle and cinematic storytelling. The five films — Glorious Ashes, The Tree House, Cu Li Never Cries, Don’t Cry Butterfly and Once Upon a Love Story — read Vietnam not merely through military history but through lived emotional, cultural and ecological experience.

Also read: 120 Bahadur review: Farhan Akhtar’s India-China war drama finds its footing in parts

While acknowledging wartime memory, the curation appears attuned to contemporary Vietnam and its post-war transitions, offering a layered history of loss, survival and rebuilding.

Festival favourites: acclaimed titles from the global circuit

Film enthusiasts will have access to a slate of festival-celebrated works under the Festival Favourites Package: It Was Just an Accident, Sentimental Value, A Poet, The Mastermind, No Other Choice, Bugonia, The Secret Agent, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Father Mother Sister Brother, The President’s Cake, Dreams (Sex Love), Sirat, Young Mothers. The package attempts to give IFFK delegates a panoramic glimpse of the year’s critically discussed films from across the global festival calendar.

Spirit of Cinema Award: honouring women filmmakers

Canadian filmmaker Kelly Fyffe-Marshall will receive this year’s Spirit of Cinema Award, which carries Rs 5 lakh, a citation and a statuette. The award, instituted at the 26th edition, honours women filmmakers who use cinema as resistance. Previous recipients include Lisa Kalän, Mahnas Mohammadi, Wanuri Kahiu and Payal Kapadia. With this, the festival continues its long-standing articulation of cinema as political conscience.