Mumbai Film Festival Goes on Hiatus for a Year

India’s popular Mumbai Film Festival, operated by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), will not have a 2025 edition.

In an announcement posted to X on Monday, festival director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, who is also India’s leading film preservation activist, wrote: “This is to inform you that the 2025 edition of MAMI Mumbai Film Festival will not take place as we are in the process of revamping the festival with a dynamic vision and a new team to ensure that the festival returns as a premier showcase for the best of independent, regional and classic cinema from India and around the world. We are working diligently to reschedule the festival and will announce the new dates for the 2026 edition as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding and support.”

This is the latest hiccup for a festival that has had its fair share of them since it was founded in 1997. The festival came close to collapse after the withdrawal of Reliance Entertainment as a sponsor in 2014 and American Express in 2013. At that time, MAMI rescued the event through a crowdfunding appeal that was in large part answered by leading celebrity names from the Bollywood industry. In 2015, the festival locked in Reliance Jio Infocomm and Star India as key sponsors.

The festival went on a three-year COVID and logistics-related absence and returned in 2023 with a hub, a refreshed executive team and a host of plans, including reviving the long-dormant market. However, billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Jio departed as title sponsor, leading to a truncated 2024 edition.

Eminent Indian filmmaker Hansal Mehta, whose “Aligarh” and “The Buckingham Murders” have opened the festival in the past, posted on X: “It’s a cruel irony that Mumbai draped in the glitz of being India’s financial and cinematic capital cannot keep alive a film festival of its own. Abandoned by the self-appointed gatekeepers of cinema who chased shinier stages and safer bets it was left in the hands of a few passionate believers to run on pure faith. And now that fragile flame has been snuffed out. No ceremony. No outrage. Just a slow, silent forgetting. What should have been a cultural cornerstone has been reduced to a footnote – another casualty of apathy dressed as progress.”

Mehta’s compatriot Praveen Morchhale, whose “Walking With the Wind” played at Camerimage and Fribourg and won at India’s National Film Awards, posted. “What a paradox. Mumbai, home to billionaires, Bollywood, and stars who walk Cannes red carpets, can’t support its own film festival. Govts use cinema for own reasons then abandon it. Filmmakers who believe in telling the truth suffer. Will we let @MumbaiFilmFest fade away? SAD”