‘Beyond Borders’ at KIFF 2025 brings hope amid tales of displacement & despair

Baby Camille wanders around the house now and then shouting ‘boom!’ Each blast shakes the glass and rattles the curtains, but she goes right back to her play. A slow, sweeping drone shot over war-torn South Lebanon in 2023 reveals a city flattened by conflict, not a single tall building left standing in Camille’s neighbourhood. The silence that follows feels haunting. Abbas Fahdel’s ‘Tales of the Wounded Land’ lays bare the heartbreak of destruction. Yet, within that devastation, it manages to capture a fragile hope for rebuilding what’s lost. In ‘Palestine 36’, Annemarie Jacir’s stirring historical epic set against the 1936 Arab Revolt against British rule, we meet Kaleem, a young shoe-shine boy and the son of a Christian priest, whose world collapses when his father is killed in a bomb blast. Arrested by the British, Kaleem never knew that his father’s death was part of a deliberate plan to eliminate detained Palestinians. His playmate Afra is guided by her grandmother to take pride in her roots and here Jacir weaves an emotional tale of resilience and belonging. The film had a 20-minute standing ovation at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival and has been selected as the Palestinian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the Oscars 2026. At Rabindra Sadan, there was pin-drop silence after the end credits rolled.

Both ‘Palestine 36’ and ‘Tales of the Wounded Land’ leave us with the same lingering feeling - hope. Hope, like the one held by pro-Arab columnist Khuloud (played by Yasmine Al Massri) in ‘Palestine 36’, that one day her homeland will be free. That same spirit runs through ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama about a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, a film that received a record 23-minute standing ovation at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize.

In a world scarred by war, displacement and migration, the ‘Beyond Borders: Displacement and Migration’ section at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) stands out as one of its most powerful additions yet. Films from Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan and Baghdad found a strong echo on the big screens of KIFF.

At the festival’s opening, from Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee to KIFF chairman and filmmaker Gautam Ghose and special guest Sujoy Ghosh, everyone echoed the same sentiment: cinema knows no borders. Ghose said, “The world is more divided than ever.” He explained that the special section was created to explore the cinema of displacement and migration. Ghose, known for films that explore cross-cultural journeys like Parikrama, added, “This is an age clouded by greed and intolerance, but cinema continues to shine as a beacon of hope. Cinema breathes even in darkness.”

Turkish filmmaker Erkan Yazici’s ‘Fragments from the East’, screened in the International Competition, also fits with this theme. The film follows a woman fleeing war who crosses paths with a runaway Russian general on his own journey toward redemption. “As a filmmaker, I believe subjects as sensitive as displacement and migration should be seen from a distance. We need to keep emotions at bay when filming such situations,” he said.

All nine films in this section, from Ayman El Amir and Nada Riyadh’s ‘The Brink of Dreams’, about Egyptian girls who form an all-female street theatre group, to Mohamed Subahi’s ‘Madaniya’, about Sudanese youth uniting online to lead a revolution, were met with applause and packed halls. The ‘Voice of Hind Rajab’ especially left audiences shaken. “My heart broke several times while watching it. How can we be so inhuman?” said Jaayeta Mazumdar, an IT professional.

This year’s focus also gains resonance with the birth centenary of Ritwik Ghatak, the legendary filmmaker whose work was defined by the pain of displacement and the Partition of India. His Partition Trilogy, ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’, ‘Komal Gandhar’ and ‘Subarnarekha’, remains a monumental exploration of the refugee experience and family dislocation. KIFF had screened six of his classics, including ‘Bari Theke Paliye’, ‘Ajantrik’ and ‘Titas Ekti Nadir Naam’. Ghatak’s stories of the uprooted and the parentless children, homeless families and disoriented refugees still find uncanny echoes in today’s fractured world. Reports suggest that at the end of 2024, an estimated 123.2 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations.

Filmmaker and producer Satrajit Sen summed up what many felt. “The ‘Beyond Borders’ section has been one of the best additions this year to KIFF. Displacement, migration and wars are burning issues. The audience response proved how necessary such films are… Every show was packed; every screening ended with applause. I really hope the KIFF committee continues this section next year and that more films on these subjects from around the world are brought to Kolkata,” he said.