India at Berlin

Start with the year that makes the shape of this story obvious: 1973.

That February - no, June, the festival still moved around the calendar back then - Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder won the Golden Bear, Berlin's top prize, for its unflinching account of the Bengal famine seen through one village's slow collapse. It was Ray's second major prize at the festival; he'd already taken the Silver Bear for Best Director eight years earlier for Charulata. On paper, this looks like the start of a straightforward story: a great director, a great festival, a relationship building steadily toward more of the same.

Except that same year, in a different section of the same festival, a thirty-three-year-old former FTII graduate named Mani Kaul brought a film called Duvidha - a folk tale of a bride, a ghost, and a merchant husband, told in a style so formally strange that it barely resembles narrative cinema at all - to a program most of the world hadn't heard of yet. It was called the Forum. It had existed for two years. And it would end up mattering to Indian cinema's relationship with Berlin more than either of Ray's Bears ever did.

A Rival Festival That Got Absorbed

The Forum wasn't born as a sidebar. It was born as a challenge. In 1971, still reeling from a censorship scandal that had nearly derailed the festival the year before, a group calling itself Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek - friends of the German film archive, led by Ulrich and Erika Gregor - set out to build something that would push back against what they saw as the Berlinale's conservatism. The festival, rather than fight them, absorbed them. The Forum came under the Berlinale's roof but never quite under its temperament. It kept, and still keeps, its own selection committee, its own instincts, and by most honest accounts, its own audience - the kind of viewer who walks into a Forum screening expecting to be confused for the first twenty minutes and grateful by the end.

That mattered enormously for the kind of Indian cinema that had nowhere else to go. The Ray-and-Competition version of Indian cinema at Berlin is a familiar story, retold enough times that it barely needs retelling here. The Forum's version is stranger and, frankly, less catalogued - which is exactly why it's worth doing properly.

The Names Nobody Put in a Textbook

Over more than five decades, the Forum has programmed upward of sixty Indian films. Not sixty retrospective screenings of the same eight canonical titles - sixty distinct entries, arriving one or two at a time, mostly without fanfare, building a relationship with Indian arthouse cinema that the Competition section never attempted and the Indian film industry itself rarely advertised.

After Kaul's Duvidha in 1973 came Kumar Shahani's Tarang in 1985 - a film about labor and capital dressed as a family melodrama, from a director who'd studied under Ritwik Ghatak and absorbed his sense that Indian cinema could be political without being didactic. The following year, Deepa Dhanraj's documentary Kya Hua Is Shahar Ko? - an unsparing look at communal violence in Hyderabad - screened at the Forum at a moment when few festivals anywhere were willing to platform that kind of reportage from India. Mrinal Sen, whose reputation rests mostly on his Cannes and Venice prizes, brought Mahaprithivi to the Forum in 1992, quietly extending a career that had already made him one of the most internationally decorated Indian directors alive.

Then the section did something that complicates any easy story about Forum being reserved for the most austere, least commercial end of Indian cinema: in 2001 it programmed Mani Ratnam's Alai Payuthey, a Tamil romantic drama from a director who was, by any definition, mainstream. Ameer's Paruthiveeran followed in 2008, Pushpendra Singh's Lajwanti in 2014, and in 2017, Amit Masurkar's Newton - a dry political comedy about a junior election officer sent to conduct a vote in a Naxalite-controlled forest - became one of the Forum's more widely seen Indian selections in recent memory, going on to become India's official Oscar submission that year.

What the Recent Years Look Like

The pattern hasn't slowed down. 2024 brought two Indian films to the Forum at once: P.S. Vinothraj's Kottukkaali and Siddharth Jatla's In the Belly of the Tiger. In 2025, the Forum's sole Indian entry was Natesh Hegde's Vaghachipani - released internationally as Tiger's Pond - the first Kannada-language film ever shown at the Berlinale in any section. It's a slow, 16mm-shot story about a small-town landlord scheming his way into a local election, and its arrival marked something the Forum has quietly been doing for fifty years without much notice: opening the door to a language or a region of Indian cinema that hadn't had a Berlin premiere before, one title at a time.

The Forum's own submission rules explain part of why this keeps happening. Films need to run over sixty minutes and arrive as a world, European, or international premiere - modest, unglamorous requirements next to the red carpet machinery of the Competition section next door. Less than one percent of submissions make the final program, which sounds brutal until you notice what that one percent has looked like, decade after decade: filmmakers whose work needed a festival willing to sit with difficulty rather than package it.

Ulrich Gregor, reflecting on the section a quarter-century after founding it, once observed that the boundaries between Forum and the rest of the Berlinale kept shifting, because the festival's other sections had started absorbing some of the very restlessness Forum was built to protect. That's as good an explanation as any for why the section still matters: it keeps moving the goalposts on what counts as difficult, so that Indian cinema arriving there has never had to soften itself to be welcome.

What TalkiesDB Tracks

Sixty-plus films across fifty-plus years is not a story that fits neatly into five acts or one landmark. It's a long, uneven scatter - a Ghatak disciple here, a mainstream Tamil hit there, a Naxalite-forest political comedy a decade after that - and scatter is exactly the kind of history that gets lost between individual festival reports and year-by-year press coverage. TalkiesDB's Berlin page holds the full run: every Forum selection, every Competition Bear, and the complete filmographies of the directors named here, Kaul and Shahani and Dhanraj included, so the thread doesn't have to be rebuilt from scratch every time someone asks where Indian arthouse cinema actually lived in Berlin.