Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) 2025: A Guide to The 14th Edition

The 14th edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) will run from October 30 to November 2 this year. Per usual, it will take place at the Tibetan Children’s Village, a school in Upper Dharamshala, where the hall and auditorium are turned into theaters, with additional inflatable theaters from PictureTime ballooning in the football field and courtyard.

This year’s festival will open with Homebound, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan—India’s official selection for the Academy Awards. The programming, of around 80 feature and short films, includes Anuparna Roy’s Songs of Forgotten Trees, which won the Orizzonti Award for Best Director at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, and Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. International films include the crowdpleaser Kneecap, which was the Irish entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last year, and prescient documentaries like Orwell 2+2 = 5. A collaboration with the Sydney Film Festival is bringing in films like Lesbian Space Princess, a queer sci-fi odyssey, and The Wolves Always Come at Night, a docu-drama on displacement and survival in Mongolia.

This year, there is also going to be a masterclass with filmmaker Kiran Rao, whose film Laapataa Ladies was India’s nomination for the Academy Awards last year. In past years they have hosted Dibakar Banerjee and Pa Ranjith.

DIFF is an unusual film festival. For one, it is tightly wound around the community it was initially made for. In 2012, when the founders, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam—also independent filmmakers, based out of Dharamshala—began the festival, it was with the sole intention of introducing the Tibetan and Indian locals to world cinema. Back then, Dharamshala did not even have a theater—the first multiplex came up only in 2016.

Immediately, though, this pedagogical impulse was layered, when Sarin and Sonam saw a demand for a festival that caters not just to the locals, but also independent filmmakers and a wider audience outside of Dharamshala, especially Delhi, that was hungry for curated community spaces for engaging with cinema.

For context, in 2004, International Film Festival of India (IFFI) unmoored itself from Delhi and shifted to Goa, and the Osian Cinefan Festival, which ran in Delhi in fits and starts, gave out in 2012—their last edition. Apart from small film festivals organised by cultural centers and consulates, Delhi does not have its definitive, curated film festival where world cinema and Indian cinema can exchange notes. Dharamshala being an overnight bus from the metro, a lot of students and early career film professionals from there gather at DIFF, a festival whose gumption and spine has been made clear by screening films like Saim Sadiq’s Joyland in 2022 and Dibakar Banerjee’s Tees last year—the former not allowed a theatrical release in India due to its Pakistani origins, and the latter shelved by Netflix, allegedly for its strident political messaging. (Last year, however, for the first time, they did not get censor exemptions for two Palestinian films, and were unable to screen them—No Other Land and From Ground Zero.)

Besides, unlike most major film festivals, DIFF is, and remains, non-competitive. “There is always a little anxiety in festivals with competitions. We thought it was important to build on the camaraderie and common passion we have for cinema,” Sarin tells THR India. “It’s a philosophical as well as a practical decision. A competition is very expensive, with the jury and awards,” Bina Paul, the Programming Director at DIFF, tells THR India.

In all its years, DIFF has steered clear of title sponsors, which makes fundraising each year a renewed challenge. “There have been so many years, when around September, we don’t have the money—and we have to put up the festival in November—and we just close our eyes and continue. Tenzing and I are doing this as a labour of love, and we have a lot of volunteers, and people working here, getting paid lesser than they would elsewhere,” Sarin notes. By “cutting its coat according to its cloth,” as Paul told Scroll, DIFF sees growth not in increased numbers—of films, of an audience—but “a certain consistency and depth to the program.”

Paul was the artistic director of more than twenty editions of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), and played a pivotal role in shaping that festival. DIFF was a change of gear. “After Kerala which grew so exponentially, in terms of audiences and number of films, over 250 films, for me as a programmer at DIFF, growth means a certain raising the bar of programming, perhaps, being more discerning of audience taste, more sensitive to trends, politics etc,” Paul tells THR India.