TSFA 2025: Crafting a Shared South Asian Imagination - Living Histories, Shared Futures

Sri City: The SouthAsia Film Festival (TSFA) at Krea University, a two-day event, opened with a conscious declaration: South Asia must be seen “as a locus of imagination” beyond narrow nationalist frames. As Prof. Bishnu Mohapatra explained in his opening remarks, the festival aimed to counter “stake-centric imagination [that] obscures many things that we value, as they lie in the shadows”. Similarly, TSFA founding director Dr. Kanak Mani Dixit warned that “living histories are driven apart, but it is essential to understand [our] shared futures”. These words set the tone: TSFA is not merely a film series, but an exercise in collective cultural imagination, an attempt to weave “a different sense of people in South Asia rather than ‘states’”. Director Mitu Verma of Films Southasia underscored the same hope, urging the younger generation to embrace a shared future: “The future lies with younger generations… hope that this festival will impart change to create a shared future so that we can have a shared future”. With this mandate, TSFA’s program of documentaries gathered voices from across the region that, taken together, challenge old binaries and imagine new solidarities.

Resistance and People’s Movements

A major TSFA cluster explored how ordinary people’s resilience can reshape politics. Prateek Shekhar’s Chardi Kala: An Ode to Resilience (India, 2023) traces the farmers’ movement against the 2020 farm laws through the eyes of a farmer-cameraman who “observes, listens and documents” protest life on the highways. Rooted in the Sikh principle of chardi kala (eternal optimism), the film captures solidarity, sewa, and everyday care through shared kitchens, gyms, and songs. Shekhar described his work as an instinctive act of sewa, a “documentary service” born of empathy rather than intention, reflecting how self-documentation can itself become resistance.

Similarly, Sulochana Peiris’s #Go Home Gota (Sri Lanka, 2023) chronicles the 2022 Aragalaya uprising, born from a viral hashtag demanding President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation. Mixing social-media footage with activist interviews, it depicts how anger over fertilizer shortages grew into a million-strong, multi-ethnic movement that forced the president out. Peiris recalled sending her cameraman to Galle Face at dawn by noon; Rajapaksa had fled. “I didn’t have a plan,” she admitted, “but I knew I couldn’t let that moment pass.” Like Chardi Kala, it reveals how marginalized citizens use cameras to claim their own narratives, transforming witness into power.

Beyond protests, Mic Drop (India, 2024) by Ankit “FPC ANK” portrays dissent through culture a Bundeli rapper asserting his mother tongue in hip-hop despite precarity and industry bias. Together, these films from Punjab’s highways to Sri Lanka’s palace lawns and Bundelkhand’s studios show resistance as care, creativity, and enduring optimism: “love without judgement” even in despair.

Margins, Memory and Identity

Another strand turned to marginalized lives under social and digital pressure. Samiksha Mathur’s Hello Guyzz! (India, 2023) follows Sumita, a Bengali homemaker-turned-TikTok star, whose 100,000-strong following challenges caste and class hierarchies. Despite domestic violence and linguistic exclusion, her online fame becomes a defiant reassertion of agency. Mathur notes how Sumita’s English fluency or lack thereof marks another site of discrimination, yet her joy in self-expression renders her suburban identity dynamic and fluid.

Surbhi Dewan’s Trans Kashmir (India, 2022) turns the lens on Srinagar’s Hijra community, where activists like Aijaz create collectives amid stigma and militarization. The film captures their longing for dignity and livelihood in a “global entity called Kashmir” that rarely acknowledges them, revealing how gender and sexuality complicate belonging in conflict zones.

Echoing this compassion, Wagging Tale (Nepal, 2024) follows Rupak, a man with AIDS who finds family among stray dogs, and I Found My Yellow (Myanmar, 2024) depicts a lesbian couple creating a household during the 2021 coup. Both imagine kinships born from exclusion, turning love into quiet resistance. In Akash Ganga (India, 2023), Nirmal Chander Dhandriyal revisits the silencing of sitarist Annapurna Devi, her withdrawal from performance becomes a parable of patriarchy and erasure.

Across these works, identity under pressure takes many forms: a TikTok mother navigating bias, trans activists reclaiming space, queer couples and AIDS survivors forging homes of their own. Whether through music, pets, or phones, each film captures “stories of love, loss and belonging despite all odds,” exposing how even at society’s margins, people redefine freedom and memory.

A Flaming Forest (Kannada, 2024) chronicles the Soliga tribes’ struggle in Karnataka’s Biligiri Rangaswamy Tiger Reserve, showing how “conservation” justified evictions and erased local ecology through eucalyptus plantations. The Soligas’ testimony redefines the forest as a shared commons rooted in customary rights. This film reminds us that justice and sustainability must coexist, that the survival of forests, rivers, and people are bound by shared memory.

Reimagining Borders and Histories

Throughout TSFA’s two days, a clear throughline emerged: all the 13 films question dominant state narratives of development, history and identity. They ask viewers to imagine South Asia differently as a region of shared struggles and solidarities, not just confined to nations. This ambition was not incidental. As Prof. Mohapatra argued, academics (and by extension cultural institutions) must confront parochial nationalism: TSFA’s theme “Living Histories, Shared Futures” was meant to counter the “absence of mobility in South Asia” by connecting people’s stories. In practice, the festival did exactly that. By bringing farmers, mothers, artists and tribespeople from India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar and beyond into one lecture hall, TSFA created a space where alternate South Asia could be glimpsed, one built on empathy and cross-border care as much as history and protest.

Returning to Prof. Mohapatra’s words, TSFA invites us to see “South Asia as a locus of imagination”. It foregrounds “non-state” narratives, whether on the highway in Punjab or the jungle in Karnataka. It makes good on the hope voiced by Mitu Verma that younger generations “impart change to create a shared future”. In the end, the films themselves spoke more than any closing speech ever could. Each documentary reclaimed a forgotten past, a Tamil street song, a Naga folktale, an Urdu protest slogan, and suggested a different future in its stead.

This, ultimately, is the role of TSFA and festivals like it: to highlight plural histories and view them as a broader picture. As one final speaker put it, we cannot let political borders stop us from asking basic questions of justice and belonging. In showcasing resistance, memory and environmental wisdom across borders, TSFA modeled what a shared South Asian imagination can look like. It reminded us that across a crowded continent, people still voice common dreams for dignity, for land, for community and that through film these dreams can resonate far beyond their origins.