The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy sent the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting a list of 347 films seeking exemption from certification for the 18th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. The Ministry has now said no to 31 of them.

Films screened at festivals don't need a full CBFC certificate, but they do need this exemption, and without it, a screening simply can't go ahead. The Academy had already submitted synopses for every title. When the Ministry asked for more, it sent detailed synopses and screeners for 40 films. Thirty-one of those are the ones now blocked.

The list is not small print. It covers 18 films from the festival's official selection, nine in the International Non-Fiction section, three Festival Winners and one from the Nepal Package. The Malayalam film Globe is among them, so this isn't only a story about foreign documentaries getting caught in a filter.

What exactly got flagged

Sanitised Republic: Cast(e) and Contracts follows sanitation workers at Delhi's Kalawati Saran Children's Hospital and Lady Hardinge Medical College, staff who kept the wards running through COVID and were let go in June 2022. It's a film about contract labour and where caste sits inside that system, and it's now stuck.

Parliament Street, about memory both public and personal tied to one Delhi road, didn't clear either. Neither did three films dealing with conflict abroad. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is built from video calls between filmmaker Sepideh Farsi and Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, and tracks life in Gaza through her lens. Memories of a Window looks at Iran's protest crackdowns as recorded by civilians filming from behind their own windows. Birds of War draws on thirteen years of archive from a Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist in London, using their relationship as the frame for revolution and exile.

The pattern is hard to miss. Kerala went through almost exactly this in December, when the Ministry denied exemption to 19 films at IFFK, including Palestinian titles and, oddly enough, the century-old Battleship Potemkin. Some of those were eventually cleared after the state and Union governments talked it through, but only some, and only after the festival had already begun making noise about it.

There's no word yet from the Ministry on why these particular 31 didn't make the cut this time, and the Academy hasn't said whether it plans to push back the way it did last year. IDSFFK's dates haven't shifted, which means Kerala now has a short runway to either get some of these films reinstated or quietly drop them from the schedule. Given how last December played out, don't expect this to be the last word on it.