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The Toronto International Film Festival turns fifty this year, and its South Asian line-up is bringing us thirteen titles from the region and its diaspora. Across the programme, high-profile Indian premieres to restored classics and formally adventurous shorts appear. Taken together, they trace a map of narratives that are both urgent and enduring, going from caste to consent to exile to migration. Rather than clustering around a single national identity, these films point to South Asia as a shifting, expansive idea that's alive in villages, metropolises, and diasporic families alike.
Among the most anticipated Indian entries are Neeraj Ghaywan’s 'Homebound', a restrained and layered drama about two friends navigating caste, religion, and the precarious promise of government work. Anurag Kashyap returns with 'Monkey in a Cage' (Bandar), a procedural that probes the intersections of fame, consent, and the legal machinery that so often decides truth. Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s 'Bayaan' adds to this momentum with a story that explores the systemic silencing of survivors and the community complicities that enable it. Each film directs its gaze toward ordinary details — the anxieties of exams, the sterile confines of a courtroom, the hesitation of a withheld confession — and from there expands into questions about the structures that govern life.
This year’s festival also celebrates the act of preservation. Two restorations — Ramesh Sippy’s landmark 'Sholay', presented in 4K to mark its fiftieth anniversary, and Satyajit Ray’s 'Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest)' — stand as reminders of how different strands of Indian cinema have shaped both popular culture and modernist expression. Newer independent voices also emergelike Jitank Singh Gurjar’s 'Vimukt (In Search of the Sky)', that's a devastating portrait of an elderly couple and their mentally challenged son, set against the harsh economic conditions of rural India, where empathy is constantly under strain.
The festival’s shorts and experimental selections bring other textures into focus. Sohrab Hura’s 'Disappeared', spanning India and Nepal, turns absence into fragile fragments of image and sound. From Bangladesh,' Ali' offers a sharp reflection on dislocation, while Pakistan contributes 'Permanent Guest' and 'Ghost School', the latter a children’s story about the closing of a school and the unsettling rumours it stirs. In their brevity, these works function almost like field notes, registering the pressures of social and political life through small but resonant gestures.
The South Asian diaspora is strongly represented as well. Aneil Karia’s 'Hamlet', featuring Riz Ahmed, repositions Shakespeare’s tragedy within the context of a present-day South Asian family in London, where questions of faith and identity are inescapable. Aziz Ansari’s 'Good Fortune' shifts tone entirely, drawing on comedy and fantasy to examine desire, celebrity, and the unpredictability of human choices. 'Nomad Shadow', co-produced by Shrihari Sathe, follows the path of a displaced woman and unfolds as a meditation on exile and the fragile architectures of home. These films extend South Asia outward, showing how migration and hybridity reframe storytelling.
Other selections push toward less familiar or more irreverent themes. 'Karupy', by Canadian-Sri Lankan filmmaker Kalainithan Kalaichelvan, unsettles expectations with its absurdist take on family dynamics and Salar Pashtoonyar’s 'I Fear Blue Skies' tracks an aid worker confronting collapse and disillusionment.
Sharing insistence on paying close attention to silenced voices, neglected communities, memories that demand restoration and remembrance, the South Asian programme at TIFF 2025 offers a panorama of a region and its diasporas through cinema, while holding space for the complexities of how people navigate their lives today.
