State Censorship and the Pushback by Filmmakers, Juries, and Audiences to Enable Screenings

The authorities’ attempts to censor films perceived as “problematic” at film festivals only validates the power of cinema, says Smriti Nevatia, examining the films that did not make the state’s cut.

Cinema, the youngest of the major art forms, is now a venerable 131, which is why certain classic films get to celebrate their centenaries. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, a foundational text for film students around the world, observed its 100th anniversary in 2025 by being banned at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), 12-19 December 2025.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) in its opaque wisdom refused to allow a tribute screening of the classic, while also disallowing Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Solanas’s iconic political documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and other – mainly Palestinian – films.

Cancelling Potemkin, which pioneered several aspects of the language of cinema while portraying the brutal suppression of people’s rebellions by the Tsarist state, is like banning Premchand at an Indian literary symposium because the powers-that-be are less than enchanted by his stories depicting social oppression (or corrupt officials). It indicates a disturbing lack of historical and cultural understanding, which was once again on unabashed display last month when the 18th edition of the prestigious International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), 25-30 September 2026, was made to drop as many as 31 films (selected from more than 1700 entries) from its screening schedule at the last minute.

(Editor’s Note: After protests from film-makers, 23 films were permitted to be screened. Scroll down for the list of eight films that still didn’t make it)

IDSFFK and its older sibling IFFK are both government-funded events, held in Thiruvananthapuram under the auspices of the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy. This can make for piquant political irony, not to mention the occasional open clash. Kerala, ruled by the Left Democratic Front coalition when the 2025 censorship brouhaha occurred, is today a Congress-led state, while MIB operates under the political tutelage of the ruling party at the Centre.

The state is the state

Bina Paul, well-known film editor, and co-founder of the Women in Cinema Collective that advocates for issues faced by women in the Malayalam film industry, was Artistic Director of both IFFK (over 20 years) and IDSFFK (around 15 years). Does she think cultural events like film festivals are becoming new political flashpoints?

Bina cautions against thinking of these as new. “The state is the state,” she says, and every political party in power pushes back against criticism, the difference being that 20 years ago it would be a “gentle suggestion” rather than an outright ban. “Earlier, we didn’t have to appeal to the Court. We would often just appeal to the [Ministry], and they’d look at it again.”

But more recently, “when Anand’s film was stopped, he went to court and got a stay order, and the festival was able to screen the film.” She is alluding to Anand Patwardhan’s Reason (Vivek), an indictment of Hindutva extremist groups for their alleged role in the assassination of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare.

In these post-truth times, we have grown familiar with the rewriting of history in school textbooks and in the public imagination. We have seen how censorship can be made to work both ways, through addition or subtraction. Protests against censorship have been par for the course, says Bina. “I feel it’s also what Kerala is – you can’t get away with things. There will be questions asked!…I think maybe in Kolkata as well.” To her mind, the really new factor is “fear”: bureaucrats are afraid to take decisions; everyone is nervous; a good deal of passing the buck occurs.

The beginnings of film festival censorship

It was the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) that notoriously set the film festival censorship controversy in motion in 2003. That year, a number of Indian film entries was rejected on the flimsy ground that they lacked “censor certificates” from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), necessary for a film’s theatrical release.

There were three problems with this, as Indian filmmakers were quick to point out: one, it had never before been a requirement in film festival spaces meant to promote the free flow of ideas and creative expression; two, the discriminatory rule was being imposed only on Indian, not on international films; three, this was blatant political censorship to weed out films critical of the state, including but not limited to films about the 2002 communal carnage in Gujarat. Some filmmakers pulled their films from the main festival and screened them alongside the rejected films at a well-attended alternative festival. The standoff had a salutary outcome: an official decision that no film, Indian or foreign, would need a censor certificate for film festival screenings; a festival would just have to submit its list of selected films, with synopses, to obtain the desired exemption from MIB.

This workaround has worked, largely. How, then, were 31 films ousted from IDSFFK’s line- up this year?

Imagine… You are a mid-level MIB bureaucrat. You can read. And this skill makes you as suited as the person in the next cubicle to wield your fat marker in the service of your country’s most literate state. Some town with some long name is holding some sort of film festival. You have seen quite a few films yourself; you even used to bunk school to go watch movies with your friends. You enjoyed “Dhurandhar 1 & 2”. Thus you are eminently qualified to decide which films might be a danger to members of the public, who might start getting ideas of the kind that would dismay your bosses.

It’s not a terribly hard task you’ve been given; you just have to read some synopses or something, you don’t actually have to watch the films, most have no stars or songs anyway, not even hot scenes like in that Swedish film you once stood for two hours in a queue to watch at a Dilli filmi festival! Just be on the lookout for red flags, you’ve been told. Those documentary filmmakers are particularly cunning. They  know how to plant those flags so well they’re hard to spot. But they can’t fool you! You find one, then another, then yet more, embedded inside words and phrases like caste, sanitation workers, Naxal-era, bauxite mining, Adivasi and Dalit, sex workers, land rights.

Some films titles themselves ring warning bells: Parliament Street, Redlight… Thanks to your vigilance, 31 of the 347 selected films will now not be shown at the upcoming IDSFFK in September. You are puffed up with patriotic pride. And so, when the s&@t hits the creaky fan above your desk, you are truly bewildered. Those cinema-mad mallus still have more than 300 films to watch. And yet they are so unhappy, they’ve gone and moved their High Court!

Seeking answers

While the festival was in full swing, many attendees were confused. Where’s this film? Wasn’t it supposed to be screening here? And that one? Shouldn’t it be on now? As news spreads about a whole slew of titles being yanked, the festival organisers were embarrassed, while the deeply upset makers of the missing films – many of which were in competition for awards – were seen protesting with supporters at the venue, wearing black.

They demanded that the juries watch the excluded films. Jury members were themselves seeking answers. Film editor Irene Dhar Malik, Non-Fiction Jury member, recalls, “We were constantly talking to the Festival authorities, asking them if there was any way we could get these films screened.”  According to her, the festival authorities kept telling the jury that they were fighting the legal fight. “They said, ‘See, we don’t want to drop the screenings, but [censorship] is a Central subject’, she added.”

They were clear, she says, that going ahead with the screenings would cause problems not only for the festival, but create obstacles for the filmmakers when they applied for censor certificates later. The jury members, finding themselves in an ethical bind, strongly felt the need to take a stand.

“On the last day, we told them the non-fiction jury is not attending the awards ceremony. We don’t approve of what is happening, ”the jury members conveyed to the festival authorities. But the jury was told: “The Chief Minister is going to call these guys up on stage to acknowledge they were at the festival and we could not screen their films, [and] we don’t support the ban.”

And so the jury was present when the filmmakers were introduced to the audience and assured that their films would be screened publicly once they were legally cleared.

(The Kerala High Court has scheduled the matter for 13 November 2026).

Kolkata-based filmmaker Debalina Majumder, whose ‘Friends of Jilipibala’ won Best Short Documentary, and who was actively involved in the protests, says it was one of their demands that the filmmakers denied screenings be named and acknowledged.

She was part of the signature campaign for a statement opposing the competitions and awards unless all selected films were considered. When the ceremony went ahead, she used the opportunity to express solidarity with her fellow filmmakers and call out the imposition of censorship while receiving her award.

The eponymous Jilipibala of Debalina’s film is a child, facing the gradual erosion of nature in her urban neighbourhood built around a historic tamarind tree. Nothing there to draw the censor’s ire, you’d think, but Debalina is no stranger to formal and informal clampdowns on her other films, which have explored queer and trans lives, and the fallout of communal violence.

When it isn’t MIB, it’s been threats by goons on campuses. In her acceptance

speech she also spoke of the recent horrific right wing assaults on students of SRFTI,

Kolkata’s film school, implicitly linking the attacks on filmmaking and on filmmakers to the same political ecosystem.

Intense scrutiny

Will today’s “safe” subject remain safe tomorrow? Can we discern any pattern or logic in what causes MIB unease? In an article for The Wire, film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha wonders, “Can the illegitimacy of state censorship be further compounded by the incomprehensibility of its actions?”

“A lot of countries face this,” says Bina. “You cannot show a film in Singapore, in the Middle East, without [scrutiny] – the world has become a bit like that.” Irene comments with irony, “Of course, they’re trying to ban political films, but they’re not doing a proper job of [even that]…the film that got the top award for Long

Documentary – that’s an extremely political film. They didn’t understand! ”

She’s referring to Close Up Up Close – The Making of Political UBU by Kamal KM, about a theatre company adapting Ubu Roi, an 1896 French play satirising a ruler’s greed for power, for the contemporary Indian stage.

If MIB is merely reading synopses, they (in the form of our imagined bureaucrat) could well have thought it was just an innocuous film about a play.

Bina, however, thinks MIB probably cross-checks film titles and filmmakers online. It is so easy nowadays to pop a film’s title into your search bar and find out what an anodyne synopsis may have downplayed for strategic reasons. Debalina has even heard rumours of a hardline committee that sniffs out “problem” films (and filmmakers!), which may explain why, when a review is sought, other Ministries like Home or External Affairs suddenly find the film sitting on their laps.

Just the country of origin may be enough to set off alarms. Of the 31 films initially refused exemption at IDSFFK, one was ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’, in which the Iranian director is in conversation throughout with a Palestinian photojournalist, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza a day after the film was selected for Cannes (where it received a brilliant reception).

Festival attendees here were dismayed that they would not get to watch it, but fortunately it was one of the 23 films abruptly cleared, and screened, before the festival ended.

The films the festival left out

The remaining films, all but one set in India, continue to languish in limbo. Only one, ‘In Search of Buddha’ by Sharanya Dey, is fiction; the tile references “The” Buddha as well as a forgotten Naxal-era leader of that name.

‘Parliament Street’ by Spandan Banerjee explores personal and public memories of this part of Delhi through the closing down of People Tree, a popular alternative bookstore.

‘Sanitised Republic: Cast(e) & Contracts’ by Afiya Khalid and Rizwan Rahman focuses on labour conditions and caste dynamics among contract sanitation workers who worked through Covid-19 in Delhi, only to lose their jobs.

‘Redlight to Limelight’ by Babuljit Basu looks at how sex workers and their children in Kolkata’s Kalighat enjoy creating stories and making videos.

‘The Mali and the Parasite’ by Sankara follows an indigenous people’s resistance movement against corporate bauxite mining in Odisha.

‘Simmering Odyssey’ observes local communities rebuilding destroyed schools in conflict- affected areas of Bastar.

‘Far From Home’ by Kristi Tethong seeks to archive the filmmaker’s parents’ memories of Tibet, and of a settlement they built in South India.

‘Our Land’, by Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, was the only cancelled film with no India connection – it retraces the murder of an indigenous leader and the ensuing trial, in the context of long-term settler colonialism and land dispossession.

Were these films deemed too “politically sensitive?”? What makes certain subjects taboo? Or to pose a better question: why do certain subjects scare the current dispensation?

Filmmakers may draw a bit of cold comfort from all this fear in the echelons of power, a fear that appears to validate the power of cinema, and art in general, to change the world – one shot, one work, one subversion and, not least, one real world protest at a time.

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Smriti Nevatia has been a curator, selector and jury member for a number of Indian and international film festivals and has collaborated on many documentary film projects. She is co-author of ‘No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy’ (Zubaan, 2015), and freelances as a text editor and translator between Hindi and English.