Here's what you missed at the London Indian Film Festival

The London Indian Film Festival is an annual celebration of both Indian cinema and British Asian filmmaking and it is celebrated across London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Started in 2009, it is an institution that has seem some of the biggest south Asian talent grace it, such as actresses Radhika Apte and Sharmila Tagore and director Anurag Kashyap and Ashutosh Gowarikar. This year the festival was graced with incredible women like Konkana Sen Sharma and her mother Aparna Sen, Taapsee Pannu and Nandita Das, who were all interviewed individually but also featured on panel about women making movies.

This year, the festival showcased exceptional documentaries like We Make Film, about film and video makers with disabilities in India and the inaccessibility and barriers to film consumption and education, Ladies Only, in which a filmmaker asks female travellers in the Women Only compartment of busy Mumbai trains, asks questions like what makes you angry to learn about the issues, hopes and struggles of womanhood in India today and Chasing Sustainability: Tales From South Asia, which is a collection of three short films looking at the effect climate change has on the people and ecosystem of South Asia.

Also on show were LGBTQIA+ short films like Queer Parivaar, a big beautiful Bollywood-esque work about a queer wedding, Muhafiz (The Protector), about whether against a backdrop of sectarian violence, a gay Hindu man find the courage to help a Muslim and Coming Out with the Help of a Time Machine, about a man who uses a time machine to keep going back and making the day he comes out to his god-fearing traditional parents, perfect.

Accompanying them were Indian films like Dobaaraa, a thriller about a woman who tries to stop the death of a boy who is brought back to life decades after his death, only to find that it alters her own life story, Dug Dug, a comedy about commercialisation of religion, when after an accident kills an alcoholic middle aged man, his motorcycle mysteriously keeps returning to the scene of the accident no matter how many times its brought to the police station and Emuthi Puthi (The Very Fishy Trip), about a grandmother and granddaughter who unite and conspire to run away from their controlling mother/daughter and fulfil their dreams.

And finally, there was a proud selection of British Asian talent including a series of powerful shorts, Americanish, a comedy about a women’s conflicted desire to marry her daughters to suitable Pakistani boys whilst still recovering from her husband leaving her and their daughter many years ago and Four Lions, a riotous comedy about four British Muslims who set out to commit an act of terror.

The exceptionally well organised event was incredible fun and a great opportunity to meet the inspiring future talent of British Indian filmmaking.