The promise of a bigger and better life in Canada where his older brother has already settled has long inundated the dreams of Navraj, a young Punjabi man in Chandigarh. But when his long-awaited visa finally gets approved, he realizes the cost of leaving home may be far greater than he ever anticipated. More than leaving behind his friends, he cannot bear to break the news to his beloved grandmother who adoringly depends on him.

In his impressive directorial debut, Jaskirat Singh explores the perennial dilemma of leaving home with beautiful simplicity and an emotional clarity that makes the story at once feel intimately relatable and deeply profound. Speaking of the pain harbored both by those who set sail and the ones who stay behind, the film pulsates with a deeply moving performance by Shahbaz Bajwa, who embodies Navraj with tenderness and raw emotion.

Jaskirat Singh

Jaskirat Singh is a filmmaker and editor trained at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata, and an alumnus of the Locarno Documentary School. Drawn to stories that challenge mainstream Punjabi stereotypes, he aspires to explore the community’s quieter, more intimate narratives. His directorial debut, As Dusk Falls, is deeply personal – rooted in his experience as the only one among five siblings still in India while the others migrated abroad. His work includes Mintgumri (2021), which screened at Dharamshala, Reykjavik, and New York; and In The Month of Love (2020), where he contributed as a script supervisor for its IFFR premiere.

An exquisitely shot experimental film by Alisha Tejpal, Mireya Martinez, and artist Anoushka Mirchandani, Landscapes of Longing weaves together an intricate tapestry of intergenerational identity and belonging, focusing on three generations of women within Mirchandani’s family: her grandmother, mother, and herself. Through a mix of archival photographs, playful music, and literary texts, the film employs an autofictional approach to explore themes of migration and memory. The seemingly disjointed clips serve to evoke the fragmented nature of memory and the complex layers of identity within diasporic experiences through evocative storytelling, inviting viewers to engage with the fluidity of time and the connections and distinctions passed down through generations that shape our understanding of self and belonging.  

Alisha Tejpal

Alisha Tejpal is an Indian filmmaker, writer, and editor whose work and collaborations have screened at festivals worldwide. Her first short film, Lata, won multiple awards and was acquired by Mubi, Arte, and the Criterion Channel. Primarily set in India, her creative practice spans fiction and non-fiction. Its central point of inquiry has always stemmed from an investigation of the invisible. Alisha’s work has received support from the Sundance Institute, Film at Lincoln Center, the Points North Institute, and the MacDowell Fellowship. She is currently developing her first feature, For the Eyes Are Blind to the Stairwells. She holds an MFA in Film Directing from the California Institute of the Arts.

Mireya Martinez

Mireya Martinez is a Mexican-American filmmaker, writer, and producer. Her sole pursuit is to tell and support stories that make the human experience palpable in all of its tatteredness, fragility, magnitude, and joy. Mireya is a Sundance Institute Fellow and was recently awarded a MacDowell Fellowship, where she developed her first feature screenplay For The Eyes Are Blind to the Stairwells. Her works have screened at festivals worldwide including San Sebastian, Sundance, True/False, New Directors/New Films, and IFFR, amongst others. She holds an MFA in Film Direction from the California Institute of the Arts.

Anoushka Mirchandani

Anoushka Mirchandani is an India-born, San Francisco-based artist. Her work probes ancestry, personal history, and cultural and sociopolitical environments through a diasporic lens, exploring the micro-tensions and identity transformations that are part and parcel of code-switching and assimilation in a foreign land. Her solo shows include Galerie Isa, UTA Artist Space, Rhodes Contemporary Art, and Glass Rice Gallery. She has participated in multiple residencies including The Wassaic Project, Silver Arts Projects’ Digital Residency, Global Coalition, KYTA, and Aegean Idea Lab, and was awarded the San Francisco Artist Grant.

Nik Dodani’s radiant directorial debut Blue Boy reimagines the coming-out narrative with rare cultural specificity and joyful possibility. Adapted from Rakesh Satyal’s novel, the film follows young Kiran’s sublime journey of self-discovery that begins with a transcendent revelation: perhaps his difference isn’t merely earthly, but divine. Dodani deftly navigates the intersection of queerness and South Asian heritage, crafting a narrative where Hindu spirituality becomes not an obstacle but an illuminating pathway. The film’s visual richness perfectly captures both childhood wonder and profound awakening, creating moments of beauty, humor, and startling clarity. Blue Boy is a queer coming-of-age story where cultural identity transforms the journey toward authentic selfhood into something truly magical.

Nik Dodani 

Nik Dodani is best known as an actor, most notably for his roles on the Netflix series Atypical and the Max original comedy The Parenting. He began his writing career as a stand-up comedian, served as a co-producer of the Tony Award-winning play Life of Pi, and has directed and produced a variety of short-form content. Blue Boy marks his narrative directorial debut.

Nikita Parikh’s short documentary, Making Space, can well be called by another name – the portrait of an artist as a young woman. The lady in focus is Alsana, for whom a room might be a distant dream but a corner shelf of her own becomes a space where her rules apply. Parikh’s gentle, free-flowing, conversational exploration is as stream of consciousness as the workings of Alsana’s mind. The filmmaker melds animation with live-action and uses Alsana’s own sketches and art to create a unique narrative. Art also becomes a mode to discuss urgent socio-political realities – gender roles, human rights, communal harmony, and the distances people are forced to travel to find safety and security for themselves and their families. 

Nikita Parikh

Nikita Parikh came to filmmaking through education during her time with Teach For India, an NGO which works in government and low-income private schools across the country. During her Master's Degree in Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, she started using participatory media tools with teenagers. She is driven by making films that promote understanding, empathy, and change.

Grappling with grief after the sudden loss of her husband, Farah finds comfort in planting the saplings that he had recently brought to their modest home. Just as she’s found an unexpected new lease on life, she discovers that a rat has invaded her garden, threatening the saplings. Farah is determined to eliminate the intruder at any cost, including her sanity, as a different kind of invasion begins to loom nearby that threatens to tear apart her entire existence.

Set in Kashmir during an unforgiving winter, the film’s mesmerizing photography and layered narrative paint a textured emotional canvas, eloquently speaking of loss in all its dimensions, from the passing of a person or the loss of a home, to the erasure of history. Infusing his emotional story with increasing suspense that, at times, rides the line of horror, Rayit Hashmat Qazi deftly explores the idea of memory as a form of resistance.  

Rayit Hashmat Qazi

Rayit Hashmat Qazi is an independent filmmaker from Kashmir, currently based in Mumbai. He has worked as an assistant director to international and Indian directors on TVC, including on the critically acclaimed film Hotel Salvation (IFFLA 2017). Rayit has also made commercials for brands like Britannia, HUL, BMC, and Airtel. Rayit is currently developing shows for Netflix and Amazon Prime. He has a degree in Audio Visual Production and Filmmaking from the Symbiosis Institute Of Media and Communication.

In Yash Saraf’s audacious allegory Moti, the everyday abruptly gives way to the impossible. A family pet’s overnight transformation into a human boy becomes a potent metaphor for our disorienting times, where radical change arrives without warning or consent. Shot with unmistakable affection for Kolkata’s textured landscapes, the film follows Moti’s journey as scientific rationality crumbles against inexplicable magic. Against shifting political and social landscapes, Saraf examines how we struggle to preserve our essential nature when everything familiar dissolves. His deft navigation between absurdist comedy and emotional resonance creates a uniquely Bengali exploration of what remains of our humanity when the world transforms beyond recognition – and how we might still find meaning within the chaos.

Yash Saraf

Yash Saraf is an Indian filmmaker from Kolkata. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Russian literature. Yash was an assistant writer for the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sooni Taraporevala (Salaam Bombay, Namesake) and Anand Gandhi (Ship of Theseus, Tumbadd). Yash is also a stage actor and has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK. Aside from filmmaking, Yash has worked as a teacher and arts educator in Mumbai, Kolkata, and New Delhi. Moti is his debut short film, which was originally conceived as a children's play for an educational arts collective (Katkatha Repertory, New Delhi).