‘The small, unheard film is the gem’: Dharamshala International Film Festival turns 15
DIFF founder Ritu Sarin and programming director Bina Paul on building a global non-mainstream cinema culture in Dharamshala as the festival turns 15
DIFF founder Ritu Sarin and programming director Bina Paul on building a global non-mainstream cinema culture in Dharamshala as the festival turns 15
Updated - October 29, 2026 04:35 am IST
Neverending queues at DIFF screenings at Tibetan Children’s Village in Upper Dharamshala. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
When the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) started in 2012, there were no cinema halls in McLeod Ganj. Films were shown on DVDs. Filmmaker couple-collaborators Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam brought their experience of the hospitality of small towns overseas hosting film festivals to the Dalai Lama’s backyard. Fourteen editions later, DIFF, now held in Tibetan Children’s Village in Upper Dharamshala, has grown. From around 2,000 attendees in its inaugural edition to over 15,000 in 2025.
While Hansal Mehta’s career-pivoting directorial Shahid (2012), starring Rajkummar Rao, opened the first edition, a black-and-white Punjabi drama, Birds in the Dark/ Hanere De Panchi, produced by Mehta, will close the 15th edition today. The film recently won the prestigious New Currents Award and Songwon Vision Audience Award (Asia) at the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF).
Naseeruddin Shah in a still from Gurvinder Singh’s Rehmat.
A still from Birds in the Dark.
BIFF co-juror and Village Rockstars director Rima Das’s new Assamese film, Not A Hero [Crystal Bear Special Mention, Berlinale], opened DIFF 2026.
“I love DIFF and the way it has grown over the years, so consistently and patiently, bringing some of the best films and creating a space for cinephiles and filmmakers to come together, share their love for cinema, and have conversations freely. It’s a place that gives you hope and makes you feel at home. Sharing films, food, the beauty of the mountains, and the richness of the local culture makes it so special. It feels wonderful to have our film Not a Hero open this year’s festival that continues to create such a beautiful space for cinema.”Rima DasAssamese filmmaker
The four-day festival is showing 95 films from 40 countries. “Most of the films this year could inspire a spark. The boundaries for telling stories are so non-existent today, from the short form to the long form, from slow to crazily paced, from fiction to non-fiction,” says director of programming, Bina Paul, adding that the only challenge she faces is organising premiere shows “since producers are attracted by competitions”. DIFF is one of the few Indian festivals to not have competitive segments. Paul brings to DIFF her nearly two decades of experience as former artistic director of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). Excerpts from an interview with Sarin and Paul:
DIFF co-founders Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam.
When you started the festival, did you imagine DIFF would one day grow into a festival drawing filmmakers and audiences from across the globe?
Sarin: We just wanted to create a space for our local audiences to watch the kinds of films that we loved — non-mainstream, independent films — which were not easy to access. And we thought, let’s ask filmmakers to come in person so that there would be an opportunity for interaction and discussion. From our own experience at various film festivals, the ones that made the biggest impact were the more intimate ones where directors and audiences could easily meet. We tried to replicate that model at DIFF.
The way DIFF just grew from year to year, taking on a life and a momentum of its own was truly unexpected. But its growing success didn’t translate into more funding opportunities and this obstacle has plagued us year after year. Also, given the nature of McLeod Ganj, where DIFF is held — a crowded tourist town in the mountains with no cinemas, and with very little space to expand, the logistics of running the festival has exponentially mounted. There is only so much more the festival can expand, and we really worry about how to manage the increased expectations and exploding numbers of visitors who want to attend.
Actor Adil Hussain at 2025 DIFF Conversations
How do you protect the intimacy of a small festival as its reputation grows?
Sarin: A big part of DIFF’s intimacy is its pop-up nature where the venue is a school campus, where the school continues to function. But this quaint and unusual setup has built-in limitations in that it can only expand so much, and we have more or less reached that limit. This is a huge question for us and the DIFF team: how can we grow the festival without sacrificing its intimate quality?
