The 16mm Film Festival was conceived with a view of re-connecting with the cinematic medium through it’s celluloid history. Since 2017, we have screened a number of works made on film and facilitated diverse workshops around using film as a medium. 

As we zoom past Instagram filters, automated editing apps on our phones and countless banal videos on our timeline, we want to reconnect with film as a medium. It seems almost utopian now, a time where film making was about ‘making’, meticulous and reserved for the select few patient enough to spend hours and hours on formulating a piece of art. We want to relive the magic of churning a film through a projector onto a speckless cloth, evoking the tangible quality of the medium. We also want to keep a community of artists and makers, who have always been working with film, together and slowly rebuild, through community efforts, a lost infrastructure.

With very generous and continued support from Kodak, LaborBerlin, Goethe-Institut Mumbai and the Serendipity Arts Festival, the festival has worked its way through supporting and re-building infrastructure for filmmakers and artists who want to work on film – always ensuring that the know-how keeps getting transferred over to young makers.

The 16mm Film Festival is organised by Harkat Studios, an alternative arts space and film production studio based in Mumbai and Berlin.