From Venice to Toronto to Busan, Indian cinema is no longer a festival guest but a force setting agendas. With restorations, premieres, and transnational projects, India is curating its heritage, showcasing contemporary talent, and shaping markets — signalling its shift from arrival to authority
India is back at the centre of the world’s festival map, not as a seasonal guest but as a force that shapes agendas. The signal fires are everywhere: a neorealist landmark, Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin, returns to Venice in freshly restored 4K; Toronto celebrates its 50th year with a record South Asian presence anchored by major Indian premieres and a marquee restoration of Sholay; and Busan’s October calendar is already threaded with Indian features and Indian-backed projects across both programming and the Asian Project Market. Read together, these are not isolated wins; they are the pattern of a country converting depth of craft, restoration muscle, programming relationships, and transnational networks into cultural power.
At Venice, the heritage turn is unmistakable. When Do Bigha Samin unspools in the Venice Classics line-up, it will not only mark a triumphant return for a film that once carried India’s post-Independence anxieties to the world, it will also showcase India’s restoration ecosystem itself. The restoration has been carried out with international partnerships of the highest standards, placing Roy’s film shoulder-to-shoulder with restored works by Kubrick, Kieslowski, and Kobayashi. That is canon, not courtesy. It says India is not merely exporting new films; it is curating its memory in front of the most exacting audiences on earth.
Toronto’s golden-jubilee edition has become a showcase for Indian cinema’s present tense. This year brings high-wattage Indian premieres like Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (a Gala, executive-produced by Martin Scorsese), Anurag Kashyap’s Bandar (Monkey in a Cage), and Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s Bayaan. In TIFF Classics, the 4K restoration of Sholay lands a prime anniversary spotlight.
The curatorial through-line is unmistakable: contemporary Indian auteurs are taking front-of-house real estate while classic Indian cinema is being positioned as global heritage. That one festival can hold both at peak visibility is a measure of where India sits today in the world’s cinematic imagination.
There is also the matter of scale. TIFF has called this a record year: 17 films and series from India, South Asia and the diaspora in official selection — eight from India, four from South Asia beyond India, and five diaspora titles. Numbers alone are not meaning, but in a festival where selection is ruthless, volume becomes visibility, and visibility converts to distribution and awards pathways. This is a cohort, not a coincidence.
Busan, often the lab where Asian cinema’s next wave is first sighted, is also deeply invested in Indian stories this year. The official selection already includes multiple Indian features across sections: Sanju Surendran’s If on a Winter’s Night and Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap’s KokKokKokoook in vision — Asia; Tribeny Rai’s Shape of Momo (India/Korea) in the same section; and Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s Bayaan, Anoop Lokkur’s Don’t Tell Mother, and Tannishtha Chatterjee’s Full Plate in A Window on Asian Cinema. In the newly launched competition, Spying Stars appears as a France-Sri Lanka-India co-production, underlining how Indian capital and creative talent inhabit transnational projects. The market side tells an equally important story. The Asian Project Market 2025 has unveiled 30 projects, with India prominent among the producers and creatives: Kunjila Mascillamani’s The Last of Them Plagues is backed by Payal Kapadia, Jeo Baby, and Kani Kusruti; Saurav Rai’s Lanka (The Fire) is among the Indian selections; and mainstream star power steps into development with Alia Bhatt attached as producer on a project widely reported as Difficult Daughters/Difficult Girls. When Indian names show up at the project stage in Busan, it signals depth: development capital, mentorship, and co-production fluency, not just completed films seeking screens. This surge sits on the shoulders of last year’s landmark at Cannes, where Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light became the first Indian film to win the Grand Prix, ending a 30-year gap for India in Cannes Competition.
The Cannes podium is not Toronto’s line-up and neither is Venice’s Classics slate, but together they compose a single message: programmers, juries, and markets across geographies are aligning around Indian cinema’s seriousness, range, and exportability.
What this moment says about India’s global position is clear. India is moving from participant to platform. Across Venice, Toronto, and Busan, it is present in multiple registers at once: canon, contemporary, and pipeline. This is the difference between sending films and setting the table. The presence of Indian films is mirrored by Indian curatorial influence: Meenakshi Shedde, TIFF’s Senior Programme Advisor (South Asia), has spent decades building confidence in South Asian voices among North American and European gatekeepers. Programming is power, and India is now part of that power.
Restoration has become a diplomatic language in itself. Restoring Do Bigha Zamin for Venice and Sholay for TIFF signals a policy-level understanding that preserving and circulating classic Indian cinema earns cultural capital that premieres alone cannot buy. It anchors India in film history while feeding new audiences into contemporary releases. At the same time, transnational production is the norm, not the exception.
From India-France-Sri Lanka collaborations in Busan Competition to India-backed projects at APM and the global producing constellation around Indian directors at TIFF, India’s creative economy is fluent in co-production. This reframes ‘Indian cinema’ as an international network rather than a single-country pipeline.
Finally, the diaspora multiplier is real. TIFF’s record 17 South Asian titles illustrate how stories with Indian DNA travel across borders and audience segments. Diaspora visibility reduces market risk for distributors while keeping the centre of gravity tied to Indian creative labour and themes. That is soft power with a revenue model.
In the near term, all eyes are on the TIFF premieres of Homebound, Bandar, and Bayaan to see how critics and buyers position them in awards-season lanes; on the TIFF Classics reception for Sholay as a temperature check on canonical Indian cinema for North American audiences; and on Busan’s Vision-Asia titles and APM deals for signals on which Indian filmmakers are about to graduate from development to global distribution.
If you map this across two cycles, Venice/Busan this autumn, Berlin/Cannes next spring, you will see Indian cinema’s presence now behaves like a rhythm, not a spike. The broader meaning is simple: India’s creative engine is diversifying and professionalising fast, and the world’s most competitive festival ecosystems are responding in kind.
Heritage is being curated with care; new films are premiering on the biggest stages; and projects are being incubated in the right markets. That is how a country steps from “arriving” to “arrived.”
The writer is a former civil servant. Inputs by Zoya Ahmad and Vaishnavie Srinivasan