Tender & Fearless: 5 Films Shaping The Dharamshala International Film Festival 2025

The Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) returns for its 14th edition from October 30 to November 2, 2025 — bringing with it a vibrant celebration of independent cinema from India and across the world. Over the years, DIFF has garnered a reputation for championing bold, genre-defying independent cinema that challenge convention, provoke thought, and celebrate the human spirit in all its complexity.

This year’s lineup continues that tradition, featuring a diverse mix of documentaries, narrative features, and shorts that reflect urgent social realities as much as they explore intimate personal journeys. From stories set in remote central Asia to those unfolding in bustling urban centres, DIFF 2025 promises a cinematic experience as expansive and layered as the Himalayan landscape itself.

Here’s what to watch out for at this year’s Dharamshala International Film Festival — works that embody the festival’s spirit of artistic freedom, cultural dialogue, and storytelling at its most daring and humane.

In Rohan Kanawade’s quietly affecting ‘Sabar Bonda’ (Cactus Pears), grief becomes a bridge between two men from different worlds. When Anand, a 30-something city dweller, travels to the rugged countryside of western India to observe a ten-day mourning ritual for his late father, he finds himself drawn to a solitary local farmer struggling against the pressures of remaining unmarried. What begins as a fragile companionship soon deepens into something tender and transformative. As the mourning ends, Anand must decide whether to return to his urban life, or stay in the world that has unexpectedly altered his sense of self.

Learn more about the film here.

Set in the hauntingly beautiful Bayanhongor desert of Mongolia, Gabrielle Brady’s meditative documentary captures the slow unraveling of a nomadic family’s traditional way of life. Davaa and Zaya, young herders raising four children, find their fragile existence upended after a devastating dust storm wipes out half their livestock. What follows is a poignant chronicle of migration—from the vast, windblown steppes to the harsh edges of urban life in Mongolia’s ger districts. Blending lyrical observation with mythic undertones, the film contemplates loss, adaptation, and the invisible wolves that haunt memory and survival.

Based on Sonia S.’s autobiography, Manohara K’s ‘Mikka Bannada Hakki’ (Bird of a Different Feather), tells the powerful story of a young girl navigating the world with albinism in a society that refuses to see her beyond her difference. Moving from a small village near Bengaluru to a new city school, twelve-year-old Sonia must confront everyday discrimination—from peers and teachers alike—while battling her own self-doubt and impaired vision. Through Sonia’s eyes, Manohara K crafts a delicate coming-of-age tale about courage, identity, and the quest for belonging.

In Renuka Shahane’s evocative short ‘Loop Line’, a middle-aged Maharashtrian woman, trapped in the monotony of domestic labour and her husband’s casual misogyny, begins to escape into rich inner fantasies that sustain her spirit. When her husband returns home one evening with his equally chauvinistic friends, her fragile refuge is suddenly shattered. With restrained direction and a sharp feminist gaze, Loop Line transforms an ordinary Mumbai home into a battleground of desire, frustration, and self-assertion. Learn more about ‘Loop Line’ here.

‘A Room of Our Own’ is a memory project featuring the voices and experiences of women graduates from FTII, Pune. While memory is often subjective and can veer into nostalgia, this web-based project uses personal stories of women students to question conventional histories of cinema. Through oral histories, photographs from private collections, and 13 short videos reflecting their time as students, the filmmakers foreground a shared, gendered experience—one that highlights and celebrates the contributions of women in Indian cinema, particularly those from FTII. This project is led by filmmakers Reena Mohan, Bina Paul and Surabhi Sharma.

Learn more about the 14th Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) here.

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