How Dharamshala International Film Festival was built on a mountain — one movie at a time

Flashback: 2012

It didn’t take long for filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam — who had moved to Dharamshala — to realise that despite the town’s many cultural and religious events, it lacked something that focused on contemporary culture.

Having travelled to several international film festivals, the duo felt that starting a small festival in the mountain town — one centred on bringing good, independent films to their community — made perfect sense. Thus was born the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) in 2012. During its first edition, only 32 films were shown, and that too on DVD.

“Right from the beginning, we knew that what made film festivals special was the interaction between filmmakers and audiences. Through our network of filmmaker friends, we were able to invite nine people, including Asif Kapadia, Hansal Mehta, Guy Davidi, Dan Said, Gitanjali Rao and Umesh Kulkarni. This set the stage for how DIFF would evolve. When we started, we had no great expectations — our only aim was to create a safe space in our community to enjoy and appreciate independent cinema,” recalls Sarin, co-founder of DIFF.

Cut to 14 years later.

The latest edition of DIFF — scheduled from October 30 to November 2 — will screen a total of 88 films, including features, documentaries and shorts, with a large number of young and first-time filmmakers.

Festival director Ritu Sarin remembers how, in the beginning, DIFF was run mainly by volunteers who had to learn everything on the job. “Over the years, we’ve become more experienced and streamlined the organisation of the festival. We’ve evolved from showing films on DVDs and Blu-rays to DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) — the professional format for screening films — and expanded from two venues to four. Our audiences have also grown exponentially and now come from all over India. In the beginning, we curated all the films ourselves, but as the festival grew, we decided to step back and invited Bina Paul, former artistic director of the International Film Festival of Kerala and one of India’s most experienced film programmers. She joined us as our director of programming in 2023 and has since taken charge of film selection. Although DIFF has grown from its small beginnings, at heart, it remains an intimate event with a homemade feel,” she says.

This year, DIFF received more than 800 film submissions, out of which 88 were selected. The festival continues to champion independent filmmaking and does not showcase big-budget films or star-driven projects. “However, we keep trying to attract support from the industry, as there’s so much overlap between indie filmmaking and mainstream cinema. We strongly believe that the commercial film world will eventually recognise DIFF’s contribution to filmmakers and support us,” adds Sonam, co-founder of the festival.

Despite putting Dharamshala on the international map as one of India’s leading film festivals and supporting the local economy, DIFF hasn’t received direct funding from the state government in recent years, though the local administration continues to extend its cooperation. “For the past few years, the I&B Ministry, through NFDC, has been allocating funds to DIFF, and we are very grateful for this support,” says Sonam.

While the festival doesn’t set out with a particular theme, its primary criterion is to curate a selection of films that represent the best of contemporary independent cinema — works that embody a distinctive auteur vision and push the boundaries of cinematic form. Within that framework, it also focuses on films that explore urgent socio-political questions relevant to today’s world.

Besides screenings, this year’s festival will feature several panel discussions addressing issues such as archiving and preservation, the nuances of telling local stories on a global stage, and questions of community and ecology.

“As part of our special programmes, ‘A Room of Our Own’ — an interactive web documentary featuring oral histories and archival materials from over 600 women graduates of FTII Pune — will be presented as a special installation at the festival. We will also host a masterclass with Adil Hussain on acting techniques across languages and film industries, as well as a conversation with Andrey A Tarkovsky on managing his famous father’s archives and monumental legacy. Kiran Rao will join Bina Paul for a discussion on producing independent films while maintaining commercial viability,” shares Sarin.

For the past few years, Sarin and Sonam have also organised a travelling film festival called DIFF on the Road, showcasing selected films from the DIFF archives across India and even abroad — in Sri Lanka and Dubai — in collaboration with local partners. “This has been a very rewarding experience and has allowed us to build a wide network of partnerships with like-minded organisations and people,” says Sonam.

Currently working on a feature film they hope to shoot next summer, the duo recently received a grant from the Rubin Foundation to create a video installation on the theme of interdependence and the environment.

— The writer is a Chandigarh-based freelancer