EMAMI ART EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026: Festival of Indian and International Experimental Films, Video, and Artists’ Moving Images

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The Emami Art Experimental Film Festival returns for a fifth edition, its most expansive so far. The question underneath the programme this year has less to do with what an image shows than with where it comes from, where it travels, what it carries, and what is left once it has gone. Three things are new: a Students' Experimental Cinema programme, curated programmes made with international collaborators, and, for the first time, a group exhibition of moving-image works. Together they turn some of the festival's attention onto the moving-image programme itself, and onto the festival and institutional circuit that carries such work around. EAEFF is a non-profit initiative of Emami Art, built from the start to teach, to learn, to argue, and to organise rather than only to screen, and over four editions it has found a particular place for itself in the experimental moving-image field in South Asia. This edition looks back at that work and sets it against the longer histories it came out of, going deeper into the institutional histories, the networks of collaborators and the formal experiments that keep experimental cinema an argued-over field rather than a settled one. Screenings, the exhibition, conversations, workshops and the Indian and international official selections all circle one interest: the moving image as an active thing, a meeting between bodies and machines, between archives and memory, between institutions and their afterlives, and between what a landscape or a technology makes visible and that which stays out of reach.

Several of the curated programmes share a question about what becomes of images, practices and histories once the institutions that made them are gone. Tony Balko's No More Teachers' Dirty Looks takes the history of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and reads it sideways, through the traces the place left rather than as a straight retrospective. Its companion program, No More Pencils, No More Books, moves to a younger set of filmmakers who came up out of that same history. Read together, the two ask how an artistic and pedagogical legacy carries on after the institution that held it. Anuj Malhotra curates a programme that closely examines CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image, tracing the organisation's history through the works, encounters, and friendships that formed around it, so the history reads less like a record and more like something still being made through circulation and exchange. The Light Cone programme takes temporality itself as its material: the films in it use grain, flicker, decay, archival fragments and the differences between film stocks to let more than one time sit inside a single work.

The same concern with what stays, what comes back and what can't quite be recovered runs into the festival's first moving-image exhibition, A Séance of Planetary Hauntings and Local Ghosts. Six artists show installations that work well past a single screen and push the festival's propositions off the wall and into space. Festival to Festival, a new program this year, turns the festival's attention to the machinery that gets films seen at all: the prize juries, the open calls, the pipelines between institutions that experimental work actually moves through. Goethe-Institut Kolkata brings two prize-winners from Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Daisy Ziyan Zhang's She Crossed and Froilán Urzagasti's Hay un dolor, which took the German Competition Prize in 2025. Kyoto Art Center's Video Journey brings five Kyoto-connected artists, Joyce Lam, Shinobu Soejima, Alina Zhdanova, Aki Yahata and Yu Araki, whose work turns on observation, embodiment and what is lost and kept when one culture is translated into another.

The Official Selection, Indian and International, was not built around a theme, and what emerges from it is more interesting for that. Put side by side, the films are hard to pin to any single idea of what an image now is. Some are digital, some made by hand, some generated by algorithm; some are archival, some speculative; some are documentary, some invented; some are projected, and some are met through a screen or interface. What they have in common is an appetite for testing the edge of what a moving image can hold and register.

The workshops carry the same search into a room where people work together. Sculpting Cinema: The Projected Image as Sculpture, led by Solomon Nagler and Alexandre Larose, asks what a projected image becomes once it leaves the ordinary screen and turns into something you can walk into. The Canopies Diagram: A Forum for Ecological and Folkloric Thinking Within Cinematic Practice, led by Anuj Malhotra and Ketan Dua of Kaddukkas Collective, treats filmmaking as an ecological and relational practice, with listening, conversation, writing together and shared reflection built into the method itself.

What the festival keeps trying to do, across all of this, is to stop treating the image as a finished object. It asks what comes before an image appears and what happens after it goes; what memories, bodies, places and institutions it drags along with it; and what else we might come to know by letting moving images pass through so many forms.

Sayanth R S

(Lead Curator & Programmer, EAEFF,

Associate Curator, Visual Arts and Moving Image, Emami Art)

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Short-mid Duration Category 

Award  

A Circle as the Center of the Whole, Utkarsh, 2025 

Special Mention 

Saccharine Wonderland & Forces That Make Me Shiver [Abhilash:Ishq], Tushar Gidwani, 2025 

Long Duration Category 

Award  

Boudinet’s Curtain, Maya.nk, 2024 

Special Mention 

Margherita, Devadeep Gupta, 2025 

Official Selection: India

in thin air, Rushnan Jaleel, 2025 

Goodnight, My Dear, Vanij Choksi, 2025 

Koneya Bidiru (The Last Bamboo), Meera Krishnamurthy, 2025 

Yatha: Like merchants desirous of profit who venture upon the ocean…, Coded Playhouses, 2026 

ODD, Joseph Lawrence C, 2025 

The Debris Remembers, Prashant Chavan and Sara Ather, 2025 

Smriti~ (Memoria), Shahi A J, 2025 

Horizon, Palak Hablani, 2026