DIFF 2025: Kiran Rao Keen to Create an 'Alternate Distribution System' For Independent Films

There is something both urgent and comforting about film festivals—where the receding space for independent cinema is mourned and critiqued and the scope for its expansion is both plotted and imagined. It can feel like empty promises, but it can also feel like a roadmap to a new kind of future.

At the recently concluded 14th Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF)—which opened with Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound and closed with the India premiere of Anuparna Roy’s Venice winner Songs of Forgotten Trees —these questions were kept front and center as the programming, of around 80 feature and short films, rolled out. The films were being watched even as their destinies were being discussed.

DIFF ran from October 30 to November 2 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 Picture Time ballooning in the football field and basketball courtyard.

At the ‘Vision and Voice’ masterclass, Kiran Rao, the director of Laapataa Ladies, made the case for the filmmaker-entrepreneur, where a director must be “madly inventive in order to reach your audience… to think beyond the creative process and understand the business side of filmmaking.” 

In 2013, she came on board as “presenter” for Ship of Theseus and this year, she served as executive producer for Stolen, which went directly to Amazon Prime Video, and Humans In The Loop, which released on Netflix after a theatrical release, buoying independent voices for over a decade, having a ringside view of what the exhibition and distribution channels and bottlenecks are.

Kiran Rao

For example, she pointed out that you have to pay to get your trailers played—which defeats the purpose, if, as a theater owner, you want to encourage people to come and watch more films—and pay ₹20,000 per screen for printing, which is both prohibitive and unnecessary. Apart from the nosebleed slots that these films are usually given in theaters, the idea of what “success” looks like for independent films releasing theatrically needs to be redefined. 

Rao is workshopping the idea of “Kindling Kino”, part of her production house Kindling Pictures, where independent filmmakers have a platform to showcase their film, own their IP, and get a share of the profit, if any is made. 

“In the best-case scenario, you might make one or two crores, which is amazing for an independent film today. But you’ve spent years making it. Everyone poured their time, effort, and often their own money into it. This is something we urgently need to fix. That’s why I really want to create an alternate distribution system—a platform where independent cinema can live, where anyone can watch anytime, with a small gateway fee that goes directly to the filmmaker,” she notes.

The inflatable digital theatres by PictureTime

"We are going to have a full-fledged team that is going to watch films, just the way a programming team does for film festivals. We are calling it Kindling Kino in our heads right now. It is a travelling cinema and it is going to have programming through the year," Rao said, noting that she is speaking of the project publicly for the first time.

At the panel “From Vision to Reality: The Making of Indie Cinema”, featuring Anuparna Roy, Sundance-winning Sabar Bonda’s director Rohan Parashuram Kanawade, Dechen Wangmo Roder, the filmmaker of Bhutan’s nomination for the Academy Awards I, The Song, and Nidhi Saxena, director of Secret of a Mountain Serpent, the filmmakers exchanged notes on vision and how to preserve one’s film when selling it in the marketplace of film grants in film festivals in the West—that alternatively swings between poverty porn and exotic fantasies.

“I know that no Indian or foreign producer is going to give money to make an experimental film. My films were only possible because of chance. To make my first film, I sold something and  I didn't have anything to sell for the second film, so I kept applying for grants,” Saxena noted. 

Kanawade revealed how his Sundance-winning film was deemed “a difficult sell” by several European and American sales agents, before it won at the festival, after which many of them came back to him. “I can't make a film that everyone else wants to watch; I will make a film the way I want to make a film. You have to make an honest film and have patience for things to work out,” said Kanawade.

This panel, instead, focused on the making and not the having made of independent cinema. Filmmakers presented the troubles of explaining their films to people who cannot sink into the vision of the film—providing suggestions that run counter to the tone, texture, and seeding desire of the film itself.

DIFF also featured an acting masterclass by Adil Hussain and hosted Andrey A. Tarkovsky, son of the legendary Russian filmmaker, who discussed his father’s cinematic legacy in a session titled “Spiritual Cinema”, which was followed by a screening of Nostalghia (1983)—a commitment to the idea that film festivals preserve the contemporary landscape of independent cinema, while also providing space for retrospective cinema, building cinema history.