The Palestine-sized hole in the Kerala film festival programme

At the International Film Festival of Kerala’s 30th edition, there was great cinema – and censorship.

Two days after the 30th edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram had been inaugurated on December 12, everything was going just fine. Just over 13,000 delegates at the annual cornucopia of cinema, organised by the state’s culture ministry, had already watched movies from Kerala, the rest of India and around the world.

On December 14, SMS alerts informed delegates that some films slotted for that day would be rescheduled – a not-uncommon occurrence at any large-scale film festival. But later in the day, news spread that the cancellations were not routine.

The Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which has oversight over film festival programming across India, had withheld permission for 19 titles – including a set of films about Palestine.

Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, Nadav Lapid’s Yes and Once Upon a Time in Gaza by Tarzan and Arab Nasser examine the roots of the Palestine conflict and its reverberations in the present.

Palestine 36 and All That’s Left of You are frontrunners for the Oscars in 2026.

By refusing permission for the Palestine films along with 15 others, the ministry was not merely trying to gut the programme – it was also undermining the organisers’ gesture of solidarity with Palestine.

In addition to programming films on Palestine, the organisers had invited Palestine’s ambassador to India to the opening ceremony. The keffiyeh-sporting Abdullah Abu Shawesh’s speech was prescient: he noted that the Palestinian cause was being denied a platform the world over.

The controversy about the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government’s attempts to assert control over the festival haunted the rest of the event.

The Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting can withhold permission for films to be screened for several reasons – if the subject is controversial, the film is sexually explicit, if it could incite violence or potentially embarrass a diplomatic ally.

Without the ministry’s sanction, festival organisers cannot go ahead with their programming. But that is exactly what Kerala’s Left-wing government did.

“Enlightened Kerala will not give in to such censorship,” declared Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. “All films that have been denied permission to screen will be screened at the festival.”

News reports quoting unidentified sources attempting to explain why the problem had occurred. They claimed that the festival organisers had shared the programme with the ministry very late, giving the bureaucrats in Delhi little time to look over the list.

The larger question, of course, is not about logistics but about the fundamental freedom of choice: why is the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting involved in the minutiae of a film festival programme in the first place?

The absurdity of the situation was magnified by the other titles dropped by the ministry. In its rush to block the Palestine package, somebody at the ministry had added classics to the list.

Serge Eisenstein’s 100-year-old Battleship Potemkin, for instance, is part of the curricula of film schools around the world for its pioneering cinematographic techniques, dramatic editing and stirring depiction of a mutiny by a Russian naval crew. Battleship Potemkin has been screened innumerable times in India. It is even available on YouTube. The decision to block it from being screened was baffling.

So too was the exclusion of African giant Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) and Timbuktu (2014), both of which have been shown at Indian film festivals in the past without incident. Sissako received this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the IFFK.

There are a few common threads running through the proscribed films – a focus on injustice, progressive politics, the linking of cinematic language with the expression of protest, a stand taken against state repression. By the time the event concluded on December 19, however, the list of 19 proscribed films had been pared down to six.

Among them were two films about Palestine: All That’s Left of You and Yes,

The Information and Broadcasting ministry’s role as super-censor is not restricted to the IFFK.

On paper, film festival selections are free from the certification process that constrains theatrical releases. However, the ministry must grant an exemption from censorship to the international films on the schedule – a bureaucratic strategy for backdoor control.

These rules have been in place for decades, observed in strictness or in the breach depending on which political party is in power in Delhi. The process is arbitrary. The present government has strong ideas about culture and cinema in particular, winking at films that glorify anti-minority views while frowning on any form of critique.

Indian film festivals have rarely been free from censorship or controversy. However, there is a broad understanding that festivals offer a space for audiences to watch works on the big screen that are almost impossible to access otherwise. Film festivals are considered to be nurseries for future filmmakers, giving these events a pedagogical aspect.

Oddly, one movie about Palestine at the IFFK escaped the attention of the ministry – probably because it was made by an Israeli director. Shai-Carmeli Pollak’s The Sea is a wrenching drama about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy whose innocent wish to see the Mediterranean Sea has terrible consequences.

Made with a crew of both Israelis and Palestinians, The Sea was picked as Israel’s entry for the Best International Feature at the Oscars. At the Ophir Awards, Israel’s version of the Oscars, The Sea won the Best Picture prize, which provoked the country’s hard-line government’s culture ministry to revoke funding for the event.

Carmeli-Pollak was at the IFFK with his wife and daughter. At a post-screening discussion, he said that The Sea was made so that “people can listen to and see what is going on” in his part of the world.

This is precisely what India’s Union government did not want: to let delegates watch without blinkers and to listen without interference.

The consequences of the Kerala government’s decision to defy the Union government’s proscriptions and its capitulation are likely to be felt in future editions of the IFFK. The festival that has earned a reputation for showcasing cinema that explores the realities of the fractured, fraught world we inhabit has been put on watch. So too has every other film festival in India.

Here is a summary of last week’s top stories.

Replacing MGNREGA. Parliament passed the 2025 Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill to replace the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act amid protests from the Opposition. It awaits presidential assent.

Opposition MPs stormed the well of the Lok Sabha on Thursday, shouted slogans criticising the Union government for removing Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the scheme. The Opposition held an overnight protest in the Parliament complex on Friday, criticising the manner in which the government had “bulldozed” the draft legislation through the Rajya Sabha.

MNREGA, introduced by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in 2004, guaranteed 100 days of unskilled work annually to rural households. The new legislation proposes increasing this to 125 days while also increasing the state’s share of funding to 40% – up from the current system where costs are borne by the Centre.

BJP chief ministers wanted MGNREGA to include farm work. Modi government’s bill goes another way, writes Shreegireesh Jalihal. And Tabassum Barnagarwala explains why experts fear the worst from the new job guarantee bill.

Nuclear sector opened to private players. Parliament passed the 2025 Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill, which aims to open up the civil nuclear sector to private operators. It awaits presidential assent. The bill was passed despite the Opposition’s demands that it be referred to a parliamentary committee.

The legislation proposes to allow private companies, joint ventures and government firms to construct, own, operate and decommission nuclear power plants. It also seeks to remove a provision that permits plant operators to take legal action against suppliers if defective equipment causes an accident.

The changes are intended to attract investment and help India meet its target of 100 gigawatt of nuclear power capacity by 2047.

Australia terror attack. One of the gunmen behind the mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach had links to Hyderabad, the Telangana Police said. Fifty-year-old Sajid Akram finished his Bachelor of Commerce in the city before migrating to Australia in November 1998 after marrying a woman of European origin, it said.

“Telangana Police has no adverse record against Sajid Akram during his stay in India prior to his departure in 1998,” the police said in a release. The factors that allegedly led to the radicalisation of Sajid Akram and his son Naveed did not seem to have any connection with India, it added.

Naveed Akram was born in Australia and is an Australian citizen, the police noted.

Fifteen people were killed on December 14 when a shooting targeted a celebration of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach. Forty-two people were hospitalised, including five in critical condition. Sajid Akram was shot dead by police at the scene, while Naveed Akram was taken to hospital.

Neighbourhood unrest. Large-scale violence erupted in Bangladesh after the death of a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina government. The activist, Sharif Osman Hadi had been shot on December 12 while he was leaving a mosque in Dhaka, and died on Thursday in a hospital in Singapore.

After news of his death broke on Thursday night, his supporters took to the streets of Dhaka, demanding action against his killers.

Protesters vandalised the offices of two Bangladeshi newspapers, Prothom Alo and The Daily Star. Demonstrators also reportedly bulldozed the regional office of Hasina’s Awami League in the northern city of Rajshahi.

The head of Bangladesh’s interim government Muhammad Yunus described Hadi’s death as an “irreparable loss for the nation” and urged protestors to maintain calm. He announced special prayers at mosques on Friday and a day of mourning on Saturday.

Also on Scroll last week

• ‘RSS agenda, favours Brahmins’: The controversial career of a Madras HC judge under impeachment fire
• Why a Delhi court dismissed Enforcement Directorate’s National Herald chargesheet against Gandhis
• Flyers can seek damages from IndiGo. But most will skip that route
• In Andhra village closest to where Maoist commander Hidma was killed, no one heard gunfire
• Rajasthan judge who ruled against Adani-led firm transferred the same day
• Bondi and beyond: Lessons from Kochi in a fractured world
• Assam’s SIR exemption ahead of 2026 election is a warning for the rest of India
• From dust to digital: The quest to preserve India’s bazaar art
• ‘Mrs Deshpande’ review: The star overpowers the serial killer
• Saeed Mirza’s journey: ‘Naseem is my most personal film, an epitaph for the idea of India’

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