The 18th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Keralam opens in Thiruvananthapuram on 25 September. Six days of programming, a substantial international selection, and one unresolved factual dispute between the festival’s organisers and the Union government about whether a large chunk of that programming was blocked.
Both sides have now gone on record. The accounts are not slightly different. They are irreconcilable.
The Ministry’s Position
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has stated, in language that leaves no interpretive room, that “Permission has not been denied to any film for screening in the 18th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Keralam”.
The Ministry’s account, as reported by Deccan Herald and ETV Bharat, is that 347 films were submitted for the exemption clearance that foreign titles require for festival screening. Of those, detailed synopses were requested for six. Some titles were forwarded to other ministries for comment depending on subject matter, which is standard interdepartmental practice for films touching on foreign policy, defence or similar areas.
Six queries out of 347. Zero denials. That is the government’s number.
The Festival’s Position
The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, which runs IDSFFK, says 40 films were sent for review and 31 were denied clearance. The breakdown circulated by the Academy and repeated by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, covered by The News Minute and Outlook India, runs as follows.
- 18 from the official selection
- 9 from the International Non-Fiction section
- 3 from the Festival Winners package
- 1 from the Nepal package
That is 31. The Statesman carried the same figures.
Where The Gap Could Come From
There are a few ways two honest parties arrive at wildly different counts of the same process, and it is worth laying them out rather than assuming bad faith on either side.
Different denominators. The Ministry says 347 submissions. The Academy says 40 were sent for review. Those are almost certainly counting different things, most likely total entries versus the subset of foreign titles that needed exemption clearance. If the Ministry is answering about 347 and the Academy is asking about 40, the two statements are not addressing the same set.
Denial versus non-response. A film that receives no clearance in time to be screened is, from a festival programmer’s chair, denied. From a ministry’s file, it may simply be pending. Festivals run on fixed dates. Bureaucracies do not. A clearance that arrives on 26 September for a film scheduled on 25 September is functionally a refusal and formally not one.
Forwarding as a soft block. The Ministry’s own account says some films were forwarded to other ministries by subject. A title sitting in an interdepartmental queue is neither approved nor denied. It is stuck. And the festival cannot programme a stuck film.
None of this is speculation about motive. It is the ordinary mechanics of how a hard deadline meets an open-ended process, and it produces exactly this kind of dispute.
Why It Matters Beyond Kerala
The exemption requirement is the pressure point. Any foreign film screened publicly in India without a CBFC certificate needs an exemption from the Ministry, and festivals live or die on getting those in time. That system was designed on the assumption of good faith and sufficient lead time. It does not have a built-in escalation path, and it does not produce a public record of what was refused and why.
Which is precisely why this dispute is unresolvable from the outside. There is no published list. The Academy has a number. The Ministry has a different number. Neither has released the file.
The Indian documentary sector is already the most precarious part of the film ecosystem, with no theatrical market to speak of, minimal streaming appetite for Indian non-fiction, and festivals functioning as the entire distribution infrastructure. A clearance process that even occasionally removes 31 titles from a single festival’s programme is not a paperwork problem. It is a distribution problem.
A Correction We Owe You
In our earlier reporting on this story we wrote that Bengaluru Baath had not seen a response from the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. That was wrong. A ministry statement dated 21 September existed and our research had not surfaced it. We are reporting both accounts here and we should have done so then.
Bengaluru Baath Take
Publish the list. That is the entire solution. If 347 films were submitted and none were denied, the Ministry loses nothing by publishing the disposition of all 347. If 31 were denied, the Academy loses nothing by publishing the 31 titles and the dates of the correspondence.
Right now the audience is being asked to choose between two institutions on the basis of which one they already trusted, which is not journalism, it is tribalism with a press release attached. The documents exist. Somebody should release them before the festival closes on 30 September and the whole thing quietly becomes last week’s argument.
More On Bengaluru Baath
Sources
- Deccan Herald, Ministry statement and submission figures
- ETV Bharat, Ministry statement
- The News Minute, Academy figures and section breakdown
- Outlook India, Academy and Tharoor statements
- The Statesman, denial count
