Habitat International Film Festival to kick off in Delhi from March 13

The seventh edition of the Habitat International Film Festival (HIFF) will be held from March 13 to 22 at the India Habitat Centre. The 10-day festival will screen 67 films from 18 countries in nearly 20 languages, including award-winning titles, international festival selections, retrospectives, and NETPAC picks. Twenty-four of the films in this year’s line-up are directed by women.

Hungary is the focus country this year. The programme includes 21 Hungarian films — 11 contemporary works and 10 classics in retrospectives dedicated to filmmakers István Szabó and Zoltán Fábri. Their films are known for exploring themes such as war memory, political power, and moral dilemmas in post-war Europe.

The festival will also mark the birth centenary of Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda with a six-film retrospective.

Several recent international festival winners will be screened, including the Cannes 2025 Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi, Cannes Jury Prize winners Sirat by Oliver Laxe and The Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski, the Berlinale Grand Prix winner The Botanist, the Venice Orizzonti Award winner Heidra/IVY, and the BAFTA Scotland winner Four Mothers. The line-up also includes films that premiered at festivals such as Venice, Locarno, Toronto, and Annecy.

Contemporary Hungarian films in the programme include Orphan (Árva) by László Nemes, The Silent Friend by Ildikó Enyedi, Semmelweis by Lajos Koltai, the animated documentary Pelikan Blue, and the family film I Accidentally Wrote a Book.

The festival will open with MANCH (2026), a documentary by Tanuja Shankar Khan that follows a theatre workshop with children from Delhi’s MIMA NGO who adapt Hungarian folk tales into Hindi stage performances. The closing film will be Chopin, A Sonata in Paris (2025), directed by Michał Kwieciński, which looks at the life of composer Frédéric Chopin during his years in Paris.

As part of its partnership with the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC), the festival will also screen four NETPAC award-winning films from the past year, including Hijra by Shahad Ameen and The Muralist by Sengedorj Janchivdorj.

Screenings will take place at the Stein Auditorium at India Habitat Centre.

When: March 13–22

Where: India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi