Kolkata’s People’s Film Festival to screen films on conflict & resistance
Telegraph | 22 March 2025
An independent film festival will screen 38 documentary and fiction films from India and South Asia. The films explore common themes of migration, caste, gender and ethnic struggles, and the ongoing fight against authoritarian regimes.
Films from a subcontinent hurting from sectarian strife comprise a significant share of the screening list.
The eleventh edition of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF) at Hazra's Uttam Mancha is from March 20 to 23.
The festival opens with The Pigeons of Lahore, a documentary about the lives of Pakistani migrants in Greece, human trafficking networks in Pakistan and Libya, and racist crimes against migrants. It is set against the backdrop of one of the greatest tragedies in the eastern Mediterranean, in which a packed trawler capsized off southern Greece on June 14, 2023. The official toll was 82. The victims were from Pakistan, India and beyond.
The Professor, from Bangladesh, is about Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, professor of English at University of Dhaka. He was one of the victims of the massacre carried out by the Pakistani Army in the name of Operation Searchlight on the night of March 25, 1971.
The filmmaker, Sandip Kumar Mistry, is an alumnus of University of Dhaka and Rabindra Bharati University in India. Meghna Guhathakurta, the slain professor’s daughter, is part of the film team and will be in Calcutta during the screening, along with Mistry.
Comrade Poopy follows the protests against the 2021 Myanmar military coup. It traces a travel vlogger and her husband who embark on a harrowing escape, seeking refuge in the jungles. In the wilderness, the man makes a decision to join the ranks of the resistance fighters. Amid the chaos, the couple finds comfort in an unexpected companion — a newly adopted cat they name Poopy.
The director, just called M, prefers to remain anonymous under prevailing circumstances. "My friend and his wife have lost the motivation to hold cameras again after the coup changed their lives. The only attachments they have are love for their comrades, their pet cat and themselves," M has said in a message shared by the organisers.
Also part of the festival is No Space to Pray, directed by Raunaq Singh Chopra and Devanshi Yadav. The film is set in Gurgaon, where the Muslim community faces growing opposition to praying in open spaces.
“The documentary captures the escalating conflict between Hindu Right-wing groups and Muslims, exploring the struggle for religious rights in a divided, changing India,” says a note.
The KPFF is people-supported, independent and volunteer-led. The festival lives up to its slogan of “People’s Cinema with People’s Support”. It is organised entirely on the strength of voluntary financial contributions from audiences and well-wishers.
“Our rejection of any funding, sponsorship, collaboration or endorsement from government, corporate, CSR, NGO or other institutional sources, has ensured curatorial independence. Many of these films will struggle to find space in traditional theatres and even OTT platforms because of their subjects. We can screen them because of the curatorial independence,” said Dwaipayan Banerjee, one of the organisers.