The Story
OrganizerAuroApaar is a dance-film collective founded near Puducherry by a dancer-filmmaker team with the explicit mission of promoting cross-pollination between digital and traditional arts, and the dance-film genre in particular. India has a rich and diverse dance tradition across its eight classical forms and dozens of folk forms, but the practice of creating dance-films, where the camera and the choreographer work as creative partners rather than documentation and subject, had no dedicated institutional home in India before Manifest. The festival's founding in 2022 and its fifth edition in 2026 demonstrates a consolidation: five editions in four years from a Puducherry-based independent collective is a significant achievement that speaks to the appetite for this form among Indian and international practitioners. The Global South focus and the emphasis on Indian dance traditions reflect a curatorial decision to position the festival not as an import of Western dance-film aesthetics but as a platform where Indian movement traditions can engage with screen language on their own terms.
Manifest is culturally significant as the only annual festival in India dedicated to dance-film as a genre. The dance-film form has a rich international history but has been underserved in India despite the country's extraordinary diversity of movement traditions. The festival's incubator component, supporting the development of original work, makes it a production platform as well as a screening one, which is a qualitatively different contribution to the ecosystem.
Visit Manifest, India's only annual festival dedicated to dance-film, to explore the meeting of movement and moving image. Curated by a dancer-filmmaker collective near Puducherry, it champions a genre where choreography is created for the camera, offering audiences and artists a singular platform at the frontier of dance, cinema and digital art in India.
