When IFFM launched in 2010 as Indian Film Festival: Bollywood and Beyond, the "beyond" was mostly aspirational. Fifteen years later, at IFFM 2026, the Beyond Bollywood section carried 45 films on its own, and the festival's three biggest wins of the year, Best Film, Best Director, and the People's Choice Award, went to a Malayalam superhero movie, a Kannada mythological epic, and a Hindi film led by two total newcomers. Regional cinema didn't just get a seat at the table this year. It sat at the head of it.
The clearest proof point is Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra, which took home Best Film. Directed by Dominic Arun and produced by Dulquer Salmaan through his own Wayfarer Films, the Malayalam fantasy film reimagines Kalliyankattu Neeli, a bloodthirsty Yakshi from Kerala folklore, as a modern vigilante superhero played by Kalyani Priyadarshan. It's Mollywood's first real attempt at a structured superhero franchise, and it worked commercially as well as critically, grossing north of 300 crore rupees and travelling well beyond Kerala into Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada release. A regional folk tale, retooled as genre cinema and validated by a Melbourne jury, is exactly the kind of story IFFM's programming has been building toward.
Then there's Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1, which won Rishab Shetty Best Director, on top of the festival's Leadership in Cinema Award. Shetty's prequel to his 2022 cultural phenomenon Kantara dives further into Tulu Nadu's ancestral and spiritual lore, and it did at the box office what few regional films manage: it out-earned its own predecessor and became one of the highest-grossing Kannada films ever, all while staying rooted in a very specific, very local cosmology of gods, forests, and ritual. Shetty accepting two honours in one night is IFFM underlining that "rooted" and "global" aren't opposites.
And then there's Saiyaara, technically a Hindi film and not a regional one, but its People's Choice win matters here too. Directed by Mohit Suri and led by first-time actors Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda, it became the biggest opening ever for newcomers, crossed 400 crore rupees worldwide, and did it all without a single big name attached. If Lokah and Kantara prove that regional stories can go the distance, Saiyaara proves the audience appetite driving IFFM's choices isn't really about star power at all. It's about the story.
IFFM's own programming notes trace this arc plainly: Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Assamese, Bengali, Odia, Punjabi and Kannada cinema have moved from occasional inclusions to co-headliners over the past few festival cycles, with 2023 and 2024 slates leaning on Marathi and Assamese titles and 2025 opening with a Bengali film for the first time. By 2026, that trajectory landed on a night where a Malayalam film, a Kannada film, and a film led entirely by newcomers swept the categories that matter most.
Forty-five films in Beyond Bollywood isn't just a bigger number than last year's. It's the section IFFM built its second decade around, and 2026 is the year the numbers finally caught up with the ambition.
