The Big Hoom Club’s Short Film Program, a travelling initiative dedicated to independent cinema, arrives in Kolkata on August 22 and 23 at Studio Bari. Designed to provide emerging filmmakers with a platform and audience, the programme features a diverse selection of films spanning fiction, documentary, thriller, comedy, and experimental storytelling. Across two days of screenings, audiences will encounter stories about memory, identity, home, desire, urban life, and social change, with films set in locations ranging from Delhi and Jaipur to Ladakh, Rajasthan, Bengal, and Mumbai.
In late June, The Big Hoom Club, a Delhi-based film club, kickstarted its Short Film Program, an initiative celebrating independent films and the effort, passion, and heart that go into making these small but mighty projects. The club opened submissions for the programme, with selected films set to embark on a pan-India journey across six cities, from Delhi and Chandigarh to Mumbai and Hyderabad.
The aim of the programme is to promote talent that hasn’t yet been given a platform to take centre stage. Independent filmmaking can be an extremely tedious and laborious process, and sometimes finding the right audience becomes just as difficult as making the film itself. The Short Film Program, as a decentralised film screening project, is trying to give these budding filmmakers, across genres, a chance to shine.
They’re starting their screening in Kolkata on the 22nd and 23rd of August at Studio Bari, an independent art space where the city's changing architecture meets personal archive and story.
Day one moves from character studies of unraveling minds — a delusional actor, a psychedelic dinner, body image anxieties (Pagal Actor Unemployed Rohan Gadi Neelam Bhopali) — into documentary territory, following Delhi's 2025 election day (Leher) and Ladakh's quiet erosion of memory (How Would One Know If One Forgets Something?).The day ends with shifting into genre work via the Nagari Films package: psychological drama, crime thriller, and dark comedy.
The second day opens with films about coming-of-age and desire and moves through Chaar Diwaari's playful theological road trip through Jaipur. Closing with the Public Service Broadcasting package much like the screening itself takes you across the country with intimate portraits of rural Rajasthan, homelessness in Bombay, a Bengal village's layered history and urban paranoia in Delhi.
Across both days, the program threads together the strange textures of contemporary Indian life. And the Short Film Program is trying to do just that, weave in the different facets and multitudes that contain the tapestry of the Indian independent film making scene.
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