From the grit of local noir to the far-flung visions of international film, the 24th Dhaka International Film Festival (DIFF) offers a dispatch from a city that lives between the frames.
If one stands long enough at the Shahbagh intersection, the rhythmic honking begins to feel like a score in search of a film. This January, that film finally arrived. The 24th Dhaka International Film Festival occupied the city from the 10 to 18 January, offering a nine-day reprieve from the gridlocked intensity of daily life. Organised by the Rainbow Film Society, a group that has championed non-commercial cinema in Bangladesh since the early seventies, and this year the event draped 245 films from 91 countries over the city’s existing chaos.
At the opening ceremony, Chen Xiang’s The Journey to No End provided the first collective breath-holding of the week. To the locals gathered in the auditorium’s half-light, the Chinese feature felt like a curious, perhaps even sympathetic, mirror to their own realities. It was the first of many such reflections.
DIFF is a festival of thresholds — between the local and the global, the digital and the celluloid, the stagnant and the moving. Navigating it requires a perpetual FOMO as one chases the tail-end of a Bahrain indie at the National Museum before racing towards a Moroccan short at Shilpakala. My own experience is a series of jump cuts. One minute I was at Stamford University Bangladesh or the National Museum, lost in a panorama, and the next I was haggling for a helmet under the winter sun. Some days, I was at my desk by 1 PM with the flickering grey of a short film still burned into my retinas. On others, I sneaked out of the office early just to catch a 5 PM screening. It feels a fitting way to consume cinema in a city that is itself a continuous, unedited tracking shot.
The journey led me back to the National Museum on 10 January, slipping into the Women Filmmakers Section for Lidija Zelovic’s Home Game. The documentary is a quiet look at what it means to belong, using old family videos to contrast the warmth of Sunday dinners with the cold rise of nationalism in the Netherlands. Towards the end it became impossible not to cry in the middle of the day in a room full of strangers — the act felt both deeply embarrassing and strangely liberating.
On the morning of 15 January, I took an Uber bike to Siddeswari Road for the Bangladesh Panorama at Stamford University Bangladesh. We were there for Ummid Ashraf’s Dhet!, a title that captures the guttural, untranslatable sigh of frustration uttered by every Bengali a dozen times a day. In Ashraf’s hands, this sigh becomes a cinematic philosophy. The film follows a ride-sharing motorcyclist as he navigates a bridge that folds in on itself. The bridge becomes a Möbius strip, an infinite loop where the rider’s exhaustion is reflected in neon-slicked asphalt. The film eschews poverty porn for a sleek, metallic existentialism. In Dhaka, getting stuck is the primary human condition, Dhet! simply gave that condition a haunting, throbbing pulse.
Outside the university, the city’s gridlock felt more endless than usual. As I stood on the curb, waiting for our respective Ubers to arrive, I fell into conversation with a fellow film-goer. “You know,” she said, gesturing toward the moving traffic, “anywhere else, a film like Dhet! is surrealism. Here, it’s practically a documentary. These young directors don’t even need to invent monsters anymore.”
The pace finally shifted on 17 January. I found a different kind of stillness at the Alliance Française de Dhaka for a retrospective of Claude Sautet’s 1970 classic, Les Choses de la Vie. The film follows Pierre, a man caught between the disparate lives of his mistress and his ex-wife, whose existence flashes before his eyes during a meticulously captured car crash. Sautet extracts a lifetime of meaning from the smallest gestures. This focus on the ordinary tragedy of a life interrupted offers a sharp contrast to our daily life.
There were, of course, parts of the festival that felt like dispatches from another world. This year, the festival stretched to Laboni Beach in Cox’s Bazar. In the capital, we only heard rumours of open-air screens where the dialogue was punctuated by the steady crash of the Bay of Bengal. For those of us trapped in the daily commute of city life, the idea of cinema meeting the salt air felt like a relief.
On the evening of the 18th, the awards were distributed with the customary mix of prestige and fatigue. China’s All Quiet at Sunrise took the Best Audience Award, while the Asian Film Competition honoured Kyrgyzstan’s Kurak as Best Film and Azerbaijan’s Emin Afandiyev as Best Director for A Lonely Person’s Monologue. In the Women Filmmakers Section, Aizada Bekbalaeva won Best Director for The Seventh Month, and the top fiction prize went to South Korea’s A Vast Algorithm of Humanity, a title that felt particularly apt as I stood watching the actual, chaotic algorithm of the city reset itself. The festival had ended, but while the credits rolled, the camera was still moving.