London: The 4K restoration of the 1972 classic ‘Pakeezah’, Haryana filmmaker’s docu-drama ‘The Calf Doll’ and Chilean Indian writer-director Shalini Adnani’s ‘Our Share of Sand’ make up the South Asian highlights of the 2026 London Film Festival (LFF) programme unveiled on Wednesday.
The annual British Film Institute (BFI) festival celebrates its 70th year between October 7 and 18 with an array of 251 titles across features, shorts, series and immersive works from 88 countries.
In the “Archive” section, the festival will host a special screening of Kamal Amrohi’s vibrant musical on October 18 after it was painstakingly restored by the Film Heritage Foundation at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Italy.
“Our stunning archival treasure is one of the last great classical musicals of Indian cinema,” Kirsty Matheson, Artistic Director of BFI Festivals, said at the programme launch in London.
“Visually opulent and emotionally tragic ‘, Pakeezah’ will be screening at the IMAX. It’s a wonderful story of star-crossed lovers and we think it is going to be a very spectacular presentation,” she said.
The restoration project was undertaken in association with the filmmaker’s grandson, Bilal Amrohi, of Lionheart Cinema, using a 35mm interpositive preserved by the Film Heritage Foundation and a 35mm intermediate reversal print provided by the National Film Archive of India (NFDC).
The restored classic from India forms part of a wide selection of films from across South Asia, spanning competition titles, documentaries, genre cinema, artist film and shorts.
Ankur Hooda’s ‘The Calf Doll’ is hailed as the arrival of a “distinctive new voice in India’s slow cinema movement”. The documentary competition title features Hooda’s grandparents as improvised versions of themselves while industrialisation and migration transform village life in Haryana.
Meanwhile, London-based Shalini Adnani presents a restrained coming-of-age drama centred on Maya, a young woman who returns to rural India and begins to understand the child labour, environmental damage and corruption underpinning her family’s wealth.
Two unusual marriage focussed tales, ‘The Difficult Bride’ from Bangladesh and ‘Lali’ from Pakistan, are among the other highlights from South Asia in this year’s line-up.
“This year, the blockbusters, the indie breakouts and the debuts have drawn audiences to cinemas in record numbers. A reminder that discovering a new film in a room of fellow fans is a thrill like nothing else,” said BFI Chief Executive Ben Roberts.
Across the 2026 film selection – divided along the categories of Love, Laugh, Dare, Debate, Cult, Thrill, Create, Journey, Family and Experimenta – directors turn to body horror, satire, thrillers, archive and intimate drama to explore beauty standards, class, labour, displacement, censorship, queer identity, war and the sustaining power of family and community.
The 70th edition of the festival will open on October 7 with British film premiere ‘Elsinore’, starring Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman, and close on October 18 with Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti starrer ‘The Debut’.
