Sep 24: The fifth edition of the Emami Art Experimental Film Festival is currently underway at the Ground Floor Galleries of Emami Art, Kolkata, from 22 to 27 September 2026. Now in its fifth year, EAEFF is a platform dedicated to experimental film, video, and artists’ moving image works, bringing together filmmakers, artists, curators, scholars, and audiences through screenings, exhibitions, workshops, masterclasses, and public conversations.

The 2026 edition marks the festival’s most expansive programme to date. The open call received 1,657 submissions from 102 countries. The selection committee chose the Indian and international selections, with the jury selecting the award winners from the Indian section. Alongside this, the festival presents four invited international programmes, an expanded cinema exhibition of artists’ moving-image works, a Students’ Experimental Cinema section, and programmes such as workshops, masterclasses and talks. Since its inception in 2022, EAEFF has grown from a regionally focused initiative into a platform for curating and building discourse around alternative and experimental practices in the moving image. 

Over its previous four editions, the festival has developed collaborations with institutions and organisations including the Sharjah Art Foundation, KADIST, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, WNDX, Nanolab, the Embassy of Switzerland to India and Bhutan, Canada Council for the Arts, Coventry Biennial, German Short Film Association, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute. Festival programmes have subsequently travelled to the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, KADIST.tv, WNDX Moving Image Festival and the Jaipur Centre for Art. The fifth edition extends this history of programming into the gallery space for the first time, bringing moving-image work into an exhibition context alongside the festival’s screening programme.

Building on this history of international exchange, the fifth edition brings together four invited programmes. Light Cone, Paris presents a selection from its collection, guest-curated by Director Emmanuel Lefrant, alongside a screening of his films. Kyoto Art Center presents works by five Japanese artists, with a reciprocal programme of Indian work travelling to Kyoto in 2027. School’s Out Forever: No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks guest-curated by artist and University of Pittsburgh faculty member Tony Balko, presents work from the city’s experimental film community. Circuit, New Zealand, presents a screening programme that examines the institutional history of CIRCUIT. 

For the first time, EAEFF presents an Expanded Cinema Exhibition of artists’ moving-image practices, bringing together installation works in Gallery 1. A new program, Students’ Experimental Cinema section features Moving Image as Research from the candidates of the PhD programme CREAM, University of Westminster, NSCAD University, the University of Colorado Boulder, Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute and the University of Pittsburgh, curated and coordinated with artist and University of Pittsburgh faculty member Tony Balko. 

The 2026 jury comprises Srikanth Srinivasan, Kamila Kuc, Mark Williams and Emmanuel Lefrant, who will select two INR 50,000 awards from the Indian Official Selection. The festival’s public programme includes workshops, a masterclass, panel discussions, roundtables, bringing together filmmakers, artists, curators, scholars around experimental moving-image practice. 

Official Selection — India

The Official Selection presents a selection of Indian experimental films and artists’ moving-image works chosen from the 2026 open call.

Short-Mid Duration Category (Under 20 minutes)

• A Circle as the Center of the Whole (2025) — Utkarsh — Award

• Saccharine Wonderland & Forces That Make Me Shiver [Abhilash:Ishq](2025) — Tushar Gidwani — Special Mention

• in thin air (2025) — Rushnan Jaleel

• Goodnight, My Dear(2025) — Vanij Choksi

• Koneya Bidiru (The Last Bamboo)(2025) — Meera Krishnamurthy

• Yatha: Like merchants desirous of profit who venture upon the ocean…(2026) — Coded Playhouses (Seerat Kaur and Mayank Dutt Kaushik)

• ODD(2025) — Joseph Lawrence C

• The Debris Remembers(2025) — Prashant Chavan and Sara Ather

• Smriti~ (Memoria)(2025) — Shahi A J

• Horizon(2026) — Palak Hablani

Long Duration Category (20–60 minutes)

• Boudinet's Curtain (2024) — Maya.nk — Award

• Margherita(2025)— Devadeep Gupta — Special Mention

Official Selection — International

 Every Epoch Dreams the Next (Johannes Gierlinger, 2025), Austria, Albania 

 L'UOMO PIÙ BELLO DEL MONDO (Paolo Baiguera, 2026), Italy 

 just above the tear duct on each side (Cáit McClay and Éiméar McClay, 2025), United Kingdom, Ireland 

 bearing fruit of fondness, Grounds of Coherence #2 (Xin Shen, 2025), United Kingdom, China 

 Possessed (Sebastian Wiedemann and Daniel Cortés, 2025), Colombia 

 as a bird that briefly perches (Dorothy Cheung, 2025), Hong Kong, United Kingdom 

 Unruly, Undead, Un Un: a place safe from all of this chaos (Riccardo Santalucia, 2026), The Netherlands 

 Detritus (Deborah S. Phillips and Zuzanna Marczak, 2025), Germany 

 The Othered Scene (Wang-Yun Yen, 2025), Taiwan, The Netherlands 

 third mountain (Tetsuya Maruyama, 2026), Brazil, United States, France 

 Night Walk in A Blue Scarf (Felix Kalmenson, 2025) — country not present in the spreadsheet 

 Amor (Javiera Cisterna Cortés, 2025), Chile 

 Land of Eternal Summer (Maya Kaminishi Jeffereis, 2025), United States, Brazil, Japan 

 Trizas (Luciana Decker Orozco, 2026), Bolivia 

 Golden Island (Arief Budiman, 2026), Indonesia, Singapore 

 Fissures (Mike Rollo, 2025), Canada 

 The light of silence (Jangwook Lee, 2026), South Korea 

 Here or here (Collective Hasard: Shayma Awawdeh, Maxime Faure, Fuad Hindieh, Julie Mengelle, Emmanuel Piton, Hélène Rastegar and Ariane Zevaco, 2025), France 

 BRANCHES FROM CONCRETE (Zhenyu Zhou, 2026), China, France 

 C0NATUS (Alejandra Arrieta, Marcela Cuevas and Gisela Guzmán, 2025), Mexico

Moving Image Exhibition

Participating Artists – Arpita Akhanda, Kaddukkas, Pankaj Sarma, Solomon Nagler & Alexandre Larose, Ushnish Mukhopadhyay, Nilanjan Bhattacharya

“Emami Art has always understood its role as more than that of a gallery: it is a space for encounters with ideas, practices, and forms that deserve a wider public. EAEFF grew from that conviction. What began as an initiative around experimental film has, over five editions, developed into an international platform connecting artists, filmmakers, institutions, and audiences through the moving image. This year’s expansion into an exhibition is an important step for us. It reflects our belief that experimental practices need not remain confined to specialist film spaces—they can enter the gallery, meet new audiences, and become part of a broader conversation around contemporary art.”Richa Agarwal (Chairperson, Kolkata Centre for Creativity & CEO, Emami Art)

“Experimental cinema asks us to look differently. If it can be named as a category at all, it makes visible what conventional images often pass over—texture, duration, movement, silence, accident, glitch, slips. The remarkable response to this year’s open call is a reminder of the breadth and vitality of moving-image practices being explored today, and of the need for spaces where this work can be encountered, discussed, and taken seriously. Over four editions, EAEFF has grown into such a space. The fifth edition takes that conversation further by bringing the moving image into the gallery as well as the screening room. For us, the gallery can do more than provide a place to show work: it can create contexts, bring different practices into dialogue, and allow audiences to encounter moving image not simply as something to watch, but as material, language, and a way of thinking.” Ushmita Sahu (Director & Head Curator, Emami Art, Festival Director, EAEFF)

“The fifth edition of EAEFF marks an important moment in the festival’s continuing engagement with the possibilities of experimental cinema and contemporary moving-image practice. To mark our fifth anniversary, we are introducing three new programmes—Moving Image Exhibition, Students’ Experimental Cinema and Festival-to-Festival. 

The Official Selection similarly reflects the extraordinary formal and conceptual diversity of experimental film today. The films move across diary and autobiographical cinema, thermochemical processes, flicker and structural practices, hybrid documentary, desktop cinema, experimental animation, photofilm, essay film and other forms that resist stable categorisation. The Students’ Experimental Cinema programme is an extension of the commitment to keeping the space open to emerging voices and new ways of thinking through images. It is important for us that the programs remain connected to pedagogical and collective spaces, where young filmmakers can encounter diverse histories of avant-garde film, video art and artists’ cinema while also questioning those histories and producing new ones. Similarly, Festival-to-Festival creates a space for dialogue between EAEFF and other institutions and communities working with experimental moving images, allowing films to travel across contexts and generating conversations that exceed geographical and institutional boundaries.” Sayanth R S (Lead Curator and Programmer, EAEFF, Associate Curator, Visual Art, & Moving Image, Emami Art)