Silver jubilee edition of NY Indian Film Festival to pay tribute to Shyam Benegal

The legacy of legendary Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal will be honoured at the New York Indian Film Festival here, which will celebrate its silver jubilee this year with a repertoire of diverse cinematic works featuring celebrated artists such as Manoj Bajpayee, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, James Ivory and Rasika Dugal.

The festival, the longest-running and prestigious US festival dedicated to Indian independent cinema, will celebrate its milestone 25th edition here from June 20-22, spotlighting “bold new voices, storied auteurs and urgent narratives” from the Indian subcontinent and its global diaspora.

“What began as a grassroots platform is now a global stage for Indian independent cinema,” Festival Director Aseem Chhabra said in a press statement Monday.

“This year’s lineup is one of our most powerful and wide-ranging to date. From deeply personal documentaries to regional narratives that rarely reach global audiences, the 25th edition of NYIFF reflects the evolving language of Indian cinema.”

The festival will pay tribute to Benegal, a ‘titan of Indian parallel cinema’, who passed away in December 2024 at the age of 90. NYIFF will screen a 4K restoration of "Manthan", Benegal's landmark 1976 film about India’s White Revolution, restored by the Film Heritage Foundation. The film premiered at the Cannes Classics in 2024.

It will also honour the work of Oscar-winning film director James Ivory, with "An Arrested Moment", a short documentary from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, directed by Dev Benegal. The film explores Ivory's “enduring fascination with Indian art and culture”.

The 2025 NYIFF lineup includes 22 feature-length films - 18 narratives and four documentaries - spanning more than a dozen languages and regions. The festival program also includes 21 short narrative and documentary films.

From Tamil and Odia to Assamese, Hindi and Malayalam, the selection of the works to be showcased at the festival “reflects both the diversity and the evolving language of Indian cinema”, it said.

Chhabra said Siddiqui, who has won two NYIFF best actor trophies, will be attending this year’s festival.

Executive Director of the Indo-American Arts Council, which presents NYIFF, Suman Gollamudi said the festival has long been a space where India’s cinematic legacy meets its most daring futures. “At 25, we are not just celebrating the past - we are investing in what’s next.”

The 2025 festival opens with the East Coast premiere of the Manoj Bajpayee, Priyanka Bose and Deepak Dobriyal starrer "The Fable", directed by Raam Reddy. With a debut at the 2024 Berlinale, the film “merges surrealism and psychological tension against the Himalayan backdrop”. The film, whose ensemble includes Tillotama Shome in a cameo, recently took home Best Film at the Leeds International Film Festival.

The festival’s centerpiece is the noir thriller "Kennedy", starring Rahul Bhat and Sunny Leone and directed by Anurag Kashyap.

The closing night film, "Little Thomas", is a coming-of-age dramedy set in 1990s Goa, marking the directorial debut of Kaushal Oza. The film stars Dugal of "Mirzapur" fame and Gulshan Devaiah of "Hunterrr" and "Ulajh" fame, who will be in attendance along with the crew.

Siddiqui’s "I’m Not An Actor", a film that “blurs fiction and reality in a searing critique of fame and identity”, Marathi documentary "Marching in the Dark" on widows of suicide-struck farmers; "Renaissance Man" about parliamentarian Vivek Tankha and "Turtle Walker" which follows a conservationist’s mission to protect India’s sea turtles are among the line-up of films that will be showcased at the festival.

The festival’s nonfiction programming includes "A Fly on the Wall", a film by Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar documenting physician-assisted suicide in Switzerland.

The New York Indian Film Festival is presented annually by the Indo-American Arts Council, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting Indian arts and culture in the United States. Since its inception in 2001, NYIFF has showcased the best in Indian cinema, celebrating the diversity and creativity of filmmakers from India and around the world.