Celebrating Excellence in Film
Honoring Global and Local Talent
Check out the winners at 12th Smita Patil International Film Festival (SPIFF), where we celebrate the brilliance of filmmakers from around the world. Discover stories that inspire, challenge, and entertain.
International Awards
Best Film 1st
Wassupkaylee
A slick abd stylish portrait of influencer culture, the film captures the seductive machinery of virality and the hidden anxieties beneath its glossy surface. Through the perspective of a 17-year-old navigating fame, precarity, and belonging, it offers a sharply observed, postmodern reflection on identity as performance. With assured control of tone and form, the film interrogates how validation, friendship, and self-worth are commodified in the digital age revealing the emotional cost of belonging in an economy driven by visibility.
Best Director
Cansu Baydar-Almost Certainly False
Confidently directed and deeply affecting, the film offers a quiet yet powerful portrait of displacement, responsibility, and longing. It subtly observes the everyday negotiations of identity, desire, and survival through the life of a young Syrian woman navigating exile in Istanbul. Eschewing melodrama in favor of attentive realism, the film allows emotion to emerge organically from gestures, silences, and unspoken tensions, resulting in a moving work that lingers well beyond its final frame
Best Film 2nd
Silent Panorama
This experimental animated miniature unfolds on a single canvas where drawing itself becomes both subject and storyteller. As new elements gradually emerge, the image continuously reshapes perspective, revealing not only the flight of a wild boar but also the quiet, persistent ways in which human presence encroaches upon spaces once claimed by nature. Rooted in memory and executed with remarkable discipline, the film transforms a solitary sheet of paper into a living landscape, inviting the viewer to witness time, movement, and meaning accumulate through the simplest of gestures.
Indian Panorama
Best Film 1st
Every Now and Then Girls
For its evocative use of animation and contemporary sound design intertwined with folk storytelling, inspired by Vijaydan Detha’s deeply rooted yet forward-looking literary vision. The film offers an adventurous, playful, and sensitive portrayal of the lives of rural girls, while incisively examining the societal gaze directed at queer desire.
Best Director
Sobita Shaba Kudtarkar - The Day Before The Wedding
The director demonstrates rare sensitivity and maturity to paint a deeply thought-provoking portrait of the human condition, marked by assured craft and a bold, feminine voice—one that speaks not only with empathy, but with profound understanding of the human psyche
Best Film 2nd
The Day Before The Wedding
A courageous and unflinching exploration of addiction, the human psyche, and the pain endured by those affected, the film set over the course of a single, harrowing day approaches its subject with remarkable emotional maturity. Both hopeful and meditative, the film places its heart alongside suffering rather than spectacle.
Smita Patil Female Filmmaker Award
Viv Li
A film of remarkable restraint and atmospheric precision, this work finds its power in stillness, texture, and the accumulation of small, telling details. Set against a harsh and isolated landscape, the direction is assured and contemplative, allowing the quiet tension of everyday encounters to unfold within carefully composed frames. Even a faint song drifting from a radio carries emotional and narrative weight deepens the film’s sense of longing and curiosity. With minimal dialogue and profound sensitivity, the film transforms isolation into a resonant cinematic experience.
Jury Special Mentions
Burn and Fade
Somewhere, in the woods. Two septuagenarians have escaped from the retirement home where they have lived for far too long. At dawn, one of them wonders: did they make the right decision by leaving?
What is your name
The film explores the inner conflict of a young Dalit woman navigating caste, identity, and silence within the promise of a government job in Mumbai. Caught between everyday discrimination and an unapologetic assertion of Ambedkarite pride, she struggles with the fear of visibility and the cost of concealment. Set against the symbolic movement of a lift and the charged atmosphere of Ambedkar Jayanti, the film traces a quiet journey from suppression to self-recognition, questioning what it takes to stand tall in a city built on vertical growth but social exclusion
Discover the Magic of SPIFF
SPIFF celebrates films from India and across the world, featuring carefully curated Indian and International competition sections, along with Special Mention awards that recognize distinctive voices and exceptional craft.
Our focus is on filmmakers and stories that often go unheard. Films that are bold, innovative, and unafraid to take creative risks. Over the years, SPIFF has grown into one of India’s most respected short film festivals, known for its thoughtful programming and a closely knit community of cinephiles who engage deeply with cinema.
If you believe in stories that challenge, question, and stay with you, SPIFF is where they belong.