Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

23rd Annual Film Festival

The 3rd i’s 23rd Annual San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival will run from October 10-12 at The Roxie Theater in San Francisco. From art-house classics to documentaries to innovative visions, 3rd i Films is committed to promoting diverse images of South Asians through independent film.

The crime thriller LITTLE JAFFNA (FRANCE, 2024) will kick off this year’s festival on opening night and offer a Q&A with director Lawrence Valin. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival 2024, Lawrence Valin’s feature was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Zurich Film Festival. Layered with nuanced sociopolitical underpinnings, it portrays an undercover French police officer of Sri Lankan descent, assigned to infiltrate a local Tamil gang in Paris. Delving deeply into its operations, he confronts the cultural complexities of his dual identity.

From dark comedy to gripping drama, 3rd i offers groundbreaking cinema from South Asia and its Diaspora. This year, Beyond Bollywood presents award-winning narrative, documentary, and short films from India, Sri Lanka, France, the UK, Canada, and the USA.

Women’s Stories & Coming of Age Tales

Women’s Stories takes center stage with Uttera Singh’s PINCH (INDIA, 2025), which premiered in the Tribeca Film Festival’s International Narrative Competition 2025. A vibrant dark comedy with nuanced and engaging social commentary, Singh’s debut feature is a must-see. Seeking good content, travel vlogger Maitri tags along with her mother, neighbors, trusted landlord Rajesh, and his wife to a temple during the Navratri festival. When Matri is groped by Rajesh on the way, she feels shocked and furious and impulsively decides to take retributive steps, setting off a chain of events that rocks her tight-knit community. There will be a Q&A with director Uttera Singh.

Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s feature CACTUS PEARS (INDIA/CANADA/UK, 2025), a sensitive and poetic study of bereavement, along with a powerful exploration of a mother-son bond, is a tender, intimate, and sensual portrait of being queer in a rural, lower-class Indian farming community. The first Indian and Marathi language film to win the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic, at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, it has resonated emotionally with audiences across borders.

Lakshmipriya Devi’s upbeat and vibrant coming-of-age feature BOONG (INDIA, 2024) centers on themes of enduring friendship within a narrative that offers insights into Manipur, India’s ethnoracial and sociopolitical unrest. Adventurous and mischievous schoolboy Boong and his friend Raju don’t see long distances and state borders as significant obstacles as they aim to reunite Boong’s divided family. 

Engaging and poignant, Aranya Sahay’s narrative HUMANS IN THE LOOP (INDIA, 2024) offers a nuanced exploration of artificial intelligence technology through the perspective of a tribal woman’s experience and her beliefs in the natural order. Nehma, an Adivasi woman, returns to her village with her children post-divorce. Taking a job as a data annotator, her role reflects the real-life involvement of many indigenous tribal women in India’s burgeoning AI industry.

Documentaries & Magic Realism

Fusing magical realism with investigative documentary, Rajee Samarasinghe’s YOUR TOUCH MAKES OTHERS INVISIBLE (SRI LANKA / USA, 2025) is an examination of thousands of missing persons during the 26-year civil war. A Tamil woman loses her son to a supernatural entity plaguing her community in a war-torn village in Northern Sri Lanka. Intertwining with her journey are real-life testimonies from women whose family members vanished at the hands of military forces. Director Rajee Samarasinghe will join a Q&A.

The Best International Feature Documentary winner at Hot Docs 2024, Nishtha Jain’s FARMING THE REVOLUTION (INDIA/FRANCE/NORWAY, 2024) takes us to the heart of the massive year-long protests against the Indian government’s exploitative farm laws during the COVID lockdown. Young Punjabi farmer Gurbaz rides his tractor 400 km, joining over half a million protesters—men and women from all generations, religions, classes, and castes—reinventing coexistence at massive protest sites on the borders of Delhi. The film invites us to experience the indomitable spirit of this historic farmers’ movement, followed by a Q&A with director Nishtha Jain.

3rd i’s Shorts

From comic relief to social insights, the 2025 edition of the signature program spans vast differences—both literally and metaphorically—with films and filmmakers from South Asia to California and throughout the Diaspora. This year’s selection of narratives and docs lifts up stories of immigration, relationships, identity, gender and sexuality, and social justice alongside Q&As with filmmakers.

San Francisco International 
South Asian Film Festival 
Oct 10-12, 2025
For more information, go to thirdi.org.