The Story
OrganizerMost film festivals celebrate cinema; the Kirloskar Vasundhara International Film Festival uses it as a tool. Billed as India's only film festival dedicated to the environment, KVIFF combines screenings of documentaries, carefully curated from across the globe, on nature, wildlife, energy, air, water and climate, with a programme of panel discussions, photo exhibitions and masterclasses led by renowned experts, all aimed at raising awareness about the state of the planet and building, in the organisers' words, the case for activist environmentalism.
The festival is the flagship of a broader movement. Kirloskar Vasundhara began in 2007 as a small industrial exhibition in Pune, an initiative of the Kirloskar group and the Vasundhara Club, and within a few years grew in scale and spirit to span more than thirty cities, building a platform that educates, inspires and encourages environmental change. The film festival sits at the heart of that platform, returning each year, typically in January, with a chosen theme, from the health of nature, society and food systems, to the importance of millets, to river restoration, that frames its screenings and conversations. By 2025 it had reached its eighteenth edition, held from 7 to 10 January, at times in hybrid or fully virtual form to widen its reach.
Beyond the festival itself, the Kirloskar Vasundhara movement runs allied, action-oriented initiatives that give its advocacy concrete form, including the Ram Nadi Restoration Mission, a collaboration of a dozen organisations to revive a polluted river near Pune, and the Eco Rangers, who carry environmental awareness through year-round programmes. Together they make KVIFF less a standalone event than the public, cultural face of a sustained environmental campaign, one that has, unusually in India, put cinema and the environment in dialogue for nearly two decades.
KVIFF's significance lies in occupying a niche almost unique in Indian cultural life: a sustained festival that fuses cinema with environmental advocacy. By curating global environmental documentaries and surrounding them with expert-led discussion, it has built one of the country's few long-running platforms where film functions explicitly as a tool for ecological awareness and action. As the flagship of a broader movement with concrete initiatives like river restoration, it links cultural programming to tangible environmental work, and as a corporate-led effort it stands as a notable example of sustained cultural and environmental philanthropy in India. Its nearly two-decade run has helped normalise the idea of environmental cinema as a civic instrument.
As climate and environmental crises sharpen, a festival that has spent nearly two decades using film to build ecological awareness matters as both a cultural and a civic institution. KVIFF offers Indian audiences access to global environmental documentary and expert dialogue, and ties that cultural work to on-the-ground initiatives. As a rare cause-driven film festival and a model of corporate cultural philanthropy, it is significant for how it positions culture in the service of sustainability. For the Atlas, KVIFF is a distinctive node connecting film, environmental advocacy and the creative economy.
