The map of Indian cinema has never been flat. It rises in unexpected places and folds in on itself with every new voice that finds a way to speak. Over the past couple of years, one institute in Kolkata has quietly become the source of many of those voices. The Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute sits on the city’s eastern flank, and it has long produced filmmakers, cinematographers, and producers who work with patience and craft. What has changed lately is the velocity and visibility. A spurt of SRFTI alumni has surged into major international festivals and markets. Their films and projects are carving out a space for the East of India as a cultural force that cannot be ignored. The headlines are arresting. You see Venice. You see Busan. You see Cannes. You also see Shillong, Guwahati, and Sikkim moving from the margins of national imagination to the very centre of global screens.
Consider the moment Venice rolled out the horizon of its Orizzonti program this year. The opening film was Mother by Teona Strugar Mitevska. It is a fierce European production that reimagines a pivotal week in the life of a young Mother Teresa in 1948 Kolkata. At first glance, this is an international film about an Indian subject. Look closer, and you find an Indian heartbeat in its credits. The Kolkata leg of the production was co-produced by SRFTI alumni Prateek Bagi and Shaunak Sur, whose company helped knit together a complex cross-continent collaboration. The festival chose Mother to open Orizzonti, and that choice gave two SRFTI producers a front row entry into the year’s most-watched launchpad for new cinematic trends. Reviews from Venice described Noomi Rapace’s turn as an intense portrait, and the Biennale listing detailed a strong European craft ensemble with Indian sound talent also in the mix. The symbolism was loud. Kolkata was not only a setting. Alumni from its film school had a hand on the steering wheel.
Across the Sea of Japan, another current gathered pace. The Busan International Film Festival’s Vision section selected two debut features by SRFTI alumni for its thirtieth edition. Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap’s Kok Kok Kokoook and Tribeny Rai’s Shape of Momo will world premiere in a program that is famously attentive to bold Asian voices. For Busan’s Asian Project Market, two more SRFTI-connected projects were chosen. Kunjila Mascillamani’s The Last Of Them Plagues arrived with heavyweight Indian indie backers, and Saurav Rai’s Lanka The Fire brought a producing team that also traces back to SRFTI. It would be remarkable if this lineup represented an entire country. The fact that so much of it clusters around one institute underlines a deeper shift. The East is not asking for entry. It is curating the room.
The road to such high visibility often begins with the quieter circuits of student and short competitions. In April, a student film presented by SRFTI’s Producing for Film and TV department was selected for the La Cinef section at Cannes. A Doll Made Up of Clay tells the story of a Nigerian footballer in Kolkata and was made by an Ethiopian SRFTI student with a zero-budget model that forces creativity to lead logistics. The cross-currents are irresistible. An African filmmaker studies in Kolkata and finds his subject among African athletes who come to the city for the side games. Kolkata’s student producers shepherd the film. Cannes acknowledges the result. This is the kind of global round trip that only a confident school culture can sustain.
To understand why this is not a string of isolated sparks, we must go into the films themselves and the people who made them. Start with Dominic Megam Sangma from Meghalaya. He is a graduate of SRFTI’s Direction and Screenplay Writing program and one of the most persuasive storytellers to emerge from the Garo Hills. Rapture Rimdogittanga is his second feature. It moves within a world of folklore and fear where whispers about outsiders turn into a tapestry of dread. The film has enjoyed a remarkable festival life and a rare theatrical release in France. It has gathered awards across Locarno, Mumbai, and the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, where it was honoured for cultural diversity. It later picked up national recognition in India. Sangma is explicit about what SRFTI offered him. He has spoken about the freedom to explore and the access to infrastructure and libraries that allow a student to become a filmmaker by watching and arguing, and trying again. That candour matters because it links the film’s textured quiet to a real pedagogy. When Rapture travels, it carries both the Garo language and the memory of a Kolkata classroom.
Rapture’s craft reveals how the institute’s alumni operate as a connected ecosystem. Cinematographer Tojo Xavier’s work bends natural light into something close to liturgy. The editing lets silence become a sound. The film belongs to a tradition of patient cinema, yet it catches contemporary anxieties with excoriating clarity. The fact that it found distribution in France tells you that stories from Meghalaya are resonating far from their place of origin. It also tells you that the old North-South axis of Indian independent cinema is being redrawn.
Move to Assam, and you find Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap. He is a young director who grew up in Guwahati and studied direction and writing at SRFTI. Kok Kok Kokoook is his first feature. The synopsis sounds like a provocation and a promise. A magic realist horror drama set in Guwahati. Migrant lives are pushed to the edge. A city that is both gritty and scenic. The idea of horror here is not an imported grammar. It grows from the region’s own tangled history with migration and identity. In interviews, Kashyap has credited mentors, including Dominic Sangma, and he speaks about the film as a conversation with the fault line that runs through Assam’s politics and memory. Busan’s Vision section saw the ambition and gave it a platform. That the film is produced by SRFTI is another important piece. It suggests a producing department that does not draw a curtain at graduation and is willing to back alumni when their stories demand scale.
Tibetan Rai’s Shape of Momo comes from Sikkim and is spoken in Nepali. A woman returns home to a family haunted by the deaths of its men. The women left behind have found a way to keep going that looks like numbness from the outside and a survival pact from the inside. She decides to interrupt that stasis. Early notes from the director suggest a pacing that allows pauses to accumulate and a rhythm that trusts audiences to live with ambiguity. The project first surfaced in a work-in-progress program that travelled to Cannes, and it now arrives at Busan. Rai studied direction and writing at SRFTI and has described the film as something that emerged from an inner necessity. A Sikkimese filmmaker making a Nepali language film that finds its early champion at a Hong Kong-affiliated platform, which then steps into Cannes. There is your loop again. There is also the gentle insistence that the Himalayas hold multitudes.
Saurav Rai extends this arc in a different register. He grew up in the hills of Darjeeling and studied direction at SRFTI. His diploma film Gudh Nest debuted at Cannes’ short film corner, and his features keep folding landscape into the story until the place becomes a character. His current project, Lanka The Fire, is selected for Busan’s Asian Project Market, where filmmakers meet potential co-producers and financiers. The selection means more than a badge. It means industry eyes that know how to read early pages and look past budget lines are paying attention. Rai’s past work has played at Karlovy Vary and Rotterdam, and he brings that credibility into the room. It also helps that his producers on the project include alumni of SRFTI’s sound and producing departments. A school becomes an industry when its graduates keep each other employed and inspired.
The Last Of Them Plagues by Kunjila Mascillamani adds another dimension. Mascillamani is an alumna of SRFTI’s direction and writing program, and her project arrives at Busan’s APM with a producing coalition that includes Payal Kapadia and Kani Kusruti. The subject matter and tone promise to be politically alert. The fact of the backing is itself a signal. It tells young filmmakers from the East that when a script has a pulse, it can find allies across the map. It also tells the global market that Indian projects are organising themselves with a new strategic clarity.
When you begin listing names, the line gets long. The institute’s own announcements record that producers Prateek Bagi and Shaunak Sur are alumni. The Venice selection of Mother made that explicit. The Busan cluster made it clearer. The Cannes student film showcased the producing department’s growing ambition. Meanwhile, national recognition at home has walked in step. This year, several SRFTI alumni picked up National Film Awards across direction, cinematography, and sound. The press in Kolkata observed that the wins came from different corners of craft. That breadth is the strongest evidence of a healthy school. You do not get that unless students move through sound stages and edit rooms with a sense that your craft must anticipate someone else’s craft.
What explains this sustained emergence? Part of the answer lies in the curriculum and infrastructure of SRFTI. Alumni often praise the access to equipment and a culture that values screening rooms as much as studios. Part of it lies in location. Kolkata is a city that asks questions. Its film culture is alive and argumentative. That tone seeps into the classroom. Another part lies in the shifting geography of Indian viewership. Regions that were treated like monochrome are now seen as crowded with stories. Filmmakers from Meghalaya and Sikkim can demand space without apology. The international ecosystem has also changed. Programs like Busan’s APM and Cannes’ La Cinef are actively scanning for voices that complicate national labels. SRFTI alumni are fluent in that conversation.
The films themselves provide the best argument for what should happen next. Rapture proves that dense local texture can travel when treated with rigour. It proves that a language with a small demographic can command a large screen if the image carries the weight of the world. Mother proves that the institute’s alumni can occupy a room in global coproduction networks and that Kolkata can serve as a practical and creative hub for international shoots. Kok Kok Kokoook and Shape of Momo prove that Northeast stories speak with urgency to an Asian audience that understands migration and gender as shared experiences rather than remote problems. The student film at Cannes proves that cross-border classroom collaborations can produce cinema that is both intimate and expansive.
If the East is in the spotlight, the question becomes how to keep it there and how to widen the beam. The answers are practical and collective.
First. Build a permanent East to World pipeline run out of Kolkata that marries story labs, completion funds, and sales mentorship. Imagine a lab in winter where selected scripts from the Northeast and East India receive dramaturgy from senior writers and directors who understand landscape as character. Follow that with a completion grant and a year of guidance from a seasoned sales agent. This is not a festival talk shop. It is a production line for sustainable careers. Busan’s APM functions in that way for Asia. Kolkata can host a region facing equivalent with SRFTI as anchor and the state’s film apparatus as partner.
Second. Strengthen production. The Venice story of Mother exists because two alumni chose to become producers who think across borders. That skill set must be institutionalised. A producers guild for the East can pool legal counsel, line producing capacity, and insurance expertise. A micro equity fund seeded by public and philanthropic money can offer first-loss capital to alumni-led projects that lock in at least one international partner. Every time a regional producer brings home a complex co-production, they bring back a map that others can retrace.
Third. Create a travelling exhibition of Northeast cinema curated by alumni. It should move through Indian metros and then tour Southeast Asia. The program can pair each feature with a short by a current student. The circuit resembles a relay where a graduating filmmaker takes the baton from a senior and hands it forward to a student. The curatorial focus must be rigorous. The films should show formal audacity as much as social urgency. The goal is not token diversity. The goal is a reputation for excellence.
Fourth. Invest in subtitling and access. Many excellent films stumble at the festival gate because subtitles flatten regional idiom. SRFTI can host an annual subtitle sprint where translators, writers, and alumni craft premium English versions and, in parallel, make versions for Thai, Korean, and French markets. Smart subtitles are crafted. Treat them like cinematography or sound. The Cannes student film about a Nigerian footballer underscored how language can travel when context is handled with care.
Fifth. Build bridges to Kolkata’s tech and design ecosystem. The newest wave of festival films often requires VFX that is invisible rather than loud. They require workflow management across countries. Partnering with local design schools and post houses can professionalise these edges. The Venice listing for Mother shows a sound and post-stack spread across Europe and India. Train alumni to manage such stacks, and the region will become a preferred execution hub for ambitious work.
Sixth. Engage the local press and national media with sustained criticism rather than episodic celebration. The Times of India’s Kolkata desk has consistently reported on SRFTI wins. That attention is excellent. It should be paired with craft analysis columns that discuss cinematography choices in Rapture or performance registers in Shape of Momo. When newspapers treat regional films with the same seriousness as metropolitan releases, audiences learn how to watch and investors learn what to back.
Seventh. Protect time for alumni to teach. Invite filmmakers like Dominic Sangma or Saurav Rai to run semester-long ateliers where they lead a single cohort through conception and rewrite. The institute’s website already reflects alumni presence as mentors and visiting faculty. Deepen that. Apprenticeship transmits temperament as much as technique. The temperament you want in the East treats silence as a narrative choice and landscape as a moral argument.
Eighth. Encourage students to look outward while looking home. The Cannes La Cinef selection came from an Ethiopian director studying in Kolkata. That exchange needs to be amplified. Offer a small number of fully funded seats each year to filmmakers from Africa and Southeast Asia. Their presence will cross-pollinate the classrooms. In return, secure seats for SRFTI students at partner schools in the region. A Kolkata student who spends a semester in Manila and a Manila student who spends a semester in Kolkata will both make films that look at the familiar with a stranger’s attention.
Ninth. Map the alumni network with practical detail. Who among them can secure permits in Meghalaya at two days’ notice? Who can unlock a recording studio in Guwahati after midnight? Who can advise on winter light in South Sikkim? Codify this knowledge and keep it updated. When a Busan selection appears, the months before the premiere become less chaotic and more deliberate. The months after the premiere become a guided plan for distribution.
Tenth. Keep talking to the state. The Venice story includes a line of gratitude to the West Bengal government for making Kolkata welcoming for international shoots. That momentum should be converted into a predictable policy. Clear incentive slabs for films that shoot extensively in the East. A single window that actually functions as one. A location service that understands how to host crews without turning cities into theme parks. Predictability is boring. In filmmaking, boring is good.
Amid the logistics and policy, the essential question of taste remains. The most lasting contribution SRFTI’s alumni are making is a taste for films that do not hurry their own truth. Rapture immerses you in fear that is almost cosmic and yet entirely local. Kok Kok Kokoook approaches horror as a way to talk about migration. Shape of Momo treats women’s solidarity as an everyday revolution rather than a set piece. Mother reframes a saint as a complicated human being whose rage and faith coexist. The Cannes student film asks the city to see the African bodies that play in its parks and live in its margins. These are not fashionable gestures. They are arguments made with images.
The result is that the East is coming into focus with clarity and colour. Meghalaya brings its forests and prayers. Assam brings its river and unease. Sikkim brings its mountain hush. Kolkata brings a studious energy and the patience of a city that has loved cinema for longer than most of us have been alive. SRFTI binds these places together not as a brand but as a workshop. A workshop where a producer will call a sound designer at midnight and fix a mix. A workshop where a director will sit in the library and come out three hours later with a way to cut the second act. A workshop where a student from another continent will find a story that belongs to both his home and his adopted city.
The next two years will test the depth of this wave. Busan will premiere the films, and APM will place the projects in rooms where deals are made. Venice will decide the prizes. Critics will write, and audiences will argue. What should not waver is the ecosystem around these filmmakers. The items listed above are not theoretical improvements. They are doable this season and the next. If executed well, they will ensure that the current surge matures into a tradition.
At the end of any conversation about Indian cinema, one returns to the question of plurality. The country has always contained multitudes. What is new is the willingness of global festivals to meet those multitudes halfway. SRFTI alumni are stepping into that space with intent. They are carrying the East with them and in doing so, they are widening what India looks like on an international screen. They do not need patronizing applause. They need allies who will buy tickets and buy time, and buy risk.
There is a line often repeated among alumni in many fields. The best thing an institute can give you is not a degree. It is the urge to keep challenging your own assumptions. You hear an echo of that in Sangma’s recollection of SRFTI as a place that let him and his peers be themselves while pushing toward discipline. That paradox creates artists who can live with uncertainty and still find an image that feels inevitable. The films discussed here share that quality. They take their time, and then they arrive with the force of something that could not have been otherwise.
The world does not change because a film wins an award. It changes because the people who made that film can suddenly make another and then another. That is the work ahead. Build the pipelines. Fund the middles of projects, not only their glittering starts and finishes. Teach audiences to meet silence with attention. Then let the films speak. The East will do the rest.