NAGARI FILM FESTIVAL
The Old GMC Complex,
Maquinez Palace Theatre
15 – 17 DEC 2025
The Nagari Film Festival 2025 was held in collaboration with the Serendipity Arts Festival 2025.
India has a strong tradition of films that explore cities as characters in themselves — their social dynamics, architecture, chaos, and contradictions. Over three days, the Nagari Film Festival presented a curated lineup of Indian films and discussions that engage with urban life through fiction, documentary, and experimental cinema.
The festival opened with the Nagari 2025 Award Ceremony, premiering this year’s anthology of short films and initiating a dialogue on the role of the public realm in our cities. The following days featured thematic sets of screenings and conversations exploring how cinema reflects, critiques, and reimagines the urban experience.
15 DECEMBER 2025
PUBLIC REALM IN URBAN INDIA
SCREENING
City on the Water
Charles Correa
The evening featured a special screening of Charles Correa’s seminal 1975 documentary ‘City on the Water’, which marks its 50th anniversary in 2025. The film examines the conception of New Bombay (now Navi Mumbai) as a response to Mumbai’s housing and infrastructure crisis, and continues to resonate for its emphasis on dignity, equity, and humane urban planning.
SCREENING
Access to Public Realm
Introduced by Sourav Sarangi
With public space as the central focus, the first set of four films examines the complex question of how much access diverse individuals have, focusing on interactions among people of different ages, genders, castes and classes.
SCREENING
Transient Nature of the Public Realm
Introduced by Bina Paul
From accessibility to ownership, public spaces in India are ever-transforming as they are a continuous creation, assertion, and coexistence of dualities of many worlds. The next set of three films together examines how collectives come together to carve their space.
SCREENING
How Spaces are Used in the Public Realm
Introduced by Jabeen Merchant & Ashmita Gupta
From ownership to use, public spaces in India carry many layers, evolving through the everyday negotiations between people, scale, and use. The four films in this set individually look into the layered use of our public spaces.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Public Realm in Urban India
In Conversation with Ram Rahman, Deepa Dhanraj & Sanjiv Shah
Moderated by Tanvi Karia
The panel explored the relationship between documentary cinema and the public realm. It discussed how public spaces are being privatised and controlled, creating hostile environments for marginalised communities. Linking this to cinema, the panel affirms how these films reflect on how urban change, power, and exclusion push vulnerable groups out of public space.
AWARD CEREMONY
Public Realm in Urban India
Introduced by Philip Enquist
The 2025 Nagari Short Film Awards were introduced by jury chair Philip Enquist, Adjunct Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago, who introduced the awards by challenging the very essence of the public realm; “Who is the space intended for, who can be here, how does public space help to achieve humane cities, humane urban environments?”.
AWARD CEREMONY
Public Realm in Urban India
Click on the image to watch Session 1 of our Nagari Film Festival 2025.
16 DECEMBER 2025
SESSION 2
CINEMA AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
SCREENING
The session, Cinema and the Right to the City, opened with a screening of the Nagari short film The Chaviwallahs of Mumbai (Akanksha Gupta & Gopal MS), which highlights inequalities in the city’s water infrastructure through the lives of valve operators.
SCREENING
हमारा शहर (1985) Bombay : Our City
Anand Patwardhan’s 1985 landmark documentary Bombay: Our City (Hamara Shahar), celebrates 40 years in 2025. Patwardhan’s film captures the struggles of working-class communities facing displacement amid Mumbai’s rapid urban transformation.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Cinema and the Right to the City
In Conversation with Anand Patwardhan, Ranjit Hoskote &
Nondita Correa Mehrotra
The panel discussion addressed housing, urban rights, and civic participation. Speakers critique exclusionary urban development that displaces vulnerable communities, arguing that instead of imposing top-down solutions, seeing everyone as citizens and learning from informal settlements is essential for building equitable and humane cities.
SESSION 2
Cinema and the Right to the City
Click on the image to watch Session 2 of our Nagari Film Festival 2025.
16 DECEMBER 2025
SESSION 3
THE CITY THROUGH MANY LENSES
SCREENING
The City Through Many Lenses
Films from the Nagari Archive
The 12 films screened from the Nagari archive offered a diverse exploration of urban life, spanning memory, identity, infrastructure, and community.
Two films, Udta Banaras (Apoorva Jaiswal, Manas Krishna) and Ganga ke Do Kinare (Avikal Parashari, Archana Singh, Asna Jamal), did not receive the exemption certificate and were not screened.
PANEL DISCUSSION
The City Through Many Lenses
In Conversation with Sanjiv Shah, Avijit Mukul Kishore &
Amit Rathee
The panel reflected on the mentorship process and the creative journey of the Nagari competition. It discussed how the initiative of documenting urban India allows its cities to be viewed closely. It creates a growing archive that captures the issues, transformations and evolutions of these cities over time.
SESSION 3
The City Through Many Lenses
Click on the image to watch Session 3 of our Nagari Film Festival 2025.
16 DECEMBER 2025
SESSION 4
FEMININE SPACES AND SILENT REVOLUTIONS
SCREENING
The Many Journeys of Water
Niki Nirvikalpa, Sugantha Priscilla & Prasanth Kumar K
This film traces how women engage with water in its multiple forms: collecting it, conserving it, protecting it, and mediating its scarcity. While water systems in cities may be engineered at large scales, the daily management of water – its labour frequently falls to women. By foregrounding their voices, the film highlights a quiet, enduring revolution: the resilience and ingenuity that women hold at the heart of our cities’ survival.
SCREENING
All We Imagine As Light
Payal kapadia
Through the lives of two nurses navigating Mumbai, Kapadia reveals the subtle, everyday negotiations that constitute female urban experience – moments of solidarity, friendship, vulnerability, and longing. The film moves between the city’s dense, conflicted spaces and the softer, dreamlike terrains where imagination becomes a form of resistance. The city becomes both a constraint and a canvas; and the women at its centre find small pockets of agency, carving out spaces where care, desire, and selfhood can exist on their own terms.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Feminine Spaces and Silent Revolutions
In Conversation with Jabeen Merchant & Kani Kusruti
The discussion examined the filmmaking process, focusing on personal perceptions and how it portrays the everyday negotiations of space and identity by women in metropolises.
SESSION 4
Feminine Spaces and Silent Revolutions
Click on the image to watch Session 4 of our Nagari Film Festival 2025.
17 DECEMBER 2025
SESSION 5
URBAN FORM AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE
SCREENING
Urban Form and the Politics of Space
Films from the Nagari Archive
These films question the neutrality of urban form. They show us that cities are not just built – they are contested. Every tower, street corner, settlement, and pipe tells a political story.
SCREENING
Vertical City
The film studies the emergence of vertical, high-rise living as a response to density, aspiration, and market-driven development in the city of Mumbai. It reveals the social frictions, the reconfigurations of community, and the stark inequalities embedded in the transformation of land into a commodity.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Urban Form and the Politics of Space
In Conversation with Avijit Mukul Kishore & Sourav Sarangi
The discussion delves into the politics, stories, and the making of ‘Vertical City’. It explored how architecture played the main character in the narrative. It shows people using the space, allowing lived experiences to reveal the intent and failure of the housing system.
SESSION 5
Urban Form and the Politics of Space
Click on the image to watch Session 5 of our Nagari Film Festival 2025.
17 DECEMBER 2025
SESSION 6
MOBILITY IN THE CITY
SCREENING
Mobility in the City
Films from the Nagari Archive
This films depict movement not just as transit from one point to another, but as a deeply social, political, and emotional act – shaped by who we are, where we come from, and how the city receives us.
SCREENING
Mera Apna Sheher (My Own City – 2011)
Sameera Jain
Mobility is something far more layered than transport infrastructure; it is a question of visibility, agency, and the everyday calibrations required to claim space. The film reveals how, for women, the act of simply moving – walking, travelling, waiting, becomes both a right and a challenge.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Mobility in the City
In Conversation with Sameera Jain & Deepa Dhanraj
The discussion delved into how mobility reflects social inclusion and exclusion, especially for women navigating the city. It highlighted how the film’s ‘multiple-camera’ approach was used to document the ‘male gaze’, revealing how these issues are deeply patriarchal.
SESSION 6
Mobility in the City
Click on the image to watch Session 6 of our Nagari Film Festival 2025.
17 DECEMBER 2025
SESSION 7
IDENTITY AND MARGINALITY IN THE MODERN CITY
SCREENING
यह वक़्त हमारा है (The Present is Ours) Ye Waqt Hamara Hai
Moin Khan and Bhawna Jaimini
Ye Waqt Hamara Hai’, a sharply observed documentary rooted in the present-day realities of Mumbai’s informal settlements. Focusing on youth activists and community organisers, the film reveals how identity is not merely inherited; it is actively shaped through participation, mutual care, and the everyday labour of holding communities together.
SCREENING
Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro
The film examines how identity is shaped not only by personal choices but by the invisible architectures of class, religion, and opportunity. The film offers a deeply humane portrait of a young man in the chawls of Bombay, negotiating the pressures of communal tension, gentrification, police violence, and shrinking avenues for aspiration. Salim’s story becomes a lens through which we witness a city turning harder, more fragmented, and increasingly hostile to those living in its margins.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Identity and Marginality in the Modern City
In Conversation with Saed Mirza & Aradhana Seth
The discussion reflected on socio-cultural portrayals in Hindi cinema, emphasising the intersections of identity, marginality, and civic participation.
SESSION 7
Identity and Marginality in the Modern City
Click on the image to watch Session 7 of our Nagari Film Festival 2025.
NAGARI HIGHLIGHTS
Hear what the People of Nagari have to say about their experiences and engagements with Nagari.
Adwaita Patil from the team महाद्वार (Mahadwar – The Great Corridor), winners of this year’s Nagari Gold Bioscope, shares her thoughts about the Nagari films initiative. She talks about how Nagari gives an opportunity not just to filmmakers, but anyone wishing to tell a story through the lens of their city through documentary film.
Click on the image to hear their experiences.
Jabeen Merchant, film editor and Nagari 2025 mentor, shares her thoughts about the mentorship process of the Nagari films initiative. She talks about the collaborative nature of the mentorship, and how this sets Nagari apart from other filmmaking grants.
Click on the image to hear their experiences.
Sanjiv Shah, filmmaker, past Nagari mentor and Nagari 2025 juror, shares his thoughts about the Nagari films initiative as an archive of urban India. He describes how the 60+ Nagari films could one day be documentation of historical value.
Click on the image to hear their experiences.
Team Level Up!
Archanaa Seker from the team ‘Level Up!’, (Jury Commendation award, Nagari 2024), shares her appreciation for the Nagari films initiative, and how it gives the filmmakers a chance to ‘visiblise’ the invisible stories and struggles from different cities — in the case of ‘Level Up!’, the work that the Disability Rights Alliance (DRA) has put in over 20 years.
Click on the image to hear their experiences.
Avijit Mukul Kishore, cinematographer, past Nagari mentor and Nagari 2025 resource expert, shares his thoughts about the significance of the body of work that the Nagari films initiative has created over 6 years. He describes how the short format nature of the films allows a filmmaker to spark the interest of their audience on pertinent urban issues.
Click on the image to hear their experiences.