The Kerala government on Tuesday directed the organisers of the 2025 International Film Festival of Kerala to go ahead with its full screening schedule, including 14 films for which the Union government had not granted permission, The Hindu reported.

State Minister for Cultural Affairs Saji Cherian directed the State Chalachitra Academy to screen all the films on the schedule of the event. He accused the Centre of adopting “an anti-democratic approach towards Kerala's progressive art and cultural tradition”, The Hindu reported.

The event in Thiruvananthapuram began on December 12 and will conclude on December 19.

The Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry had earlier denied permission to screen 19 films, including four about Palestine. The ministry later allowed five films, including two about Palestine, to be shown.

The five films for which permission was initially withheld but later granted were Beef, Eagles of The Republic, Heart of The Wolf, Yes, and Once Upon A Time In Gaza.

The films about Palestine that were denied permission were Palestine 36 and All That’s Left of You. The titles had already had an initial screening at the festival.

Palestine 36, an Arabic and English language movie, was the inaugural film of the event.

No reasons were provided for denying permission for the screenings, The Hindu quoted an unidentified official of the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy as saying.

The other films that were denied permission are A Poet: Unconcealed Poetry, Bamako, director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Battleship Potemkin, Spanish film Beef, Clash, Heart of The Wolf, Red Rain, Riverstone, The Hour of The Furnaces, Flames, Timbuktu, Wajib and Santosh.

The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy reports to the state’s cultural affairs department. The annual International Film Festival of Kerala, which the academy organises, is attended by thousands of delegates.

On December 12, at the inauguration ceremony, Kerala’s Cultural Affairs Minister Saji Cherian spoke about the state’s support for the Palestinian cause. Palestinian Ambassador to India Abdallah M Abu Shawesh was a guest at the event.

At the inauguration, while paying tribute to director Shaji N Karun, who was associated with the festival until his death in April 2025, Cherian also said that the festival was a platform that “resists fascism and autocracy while celebrating freedom of speech and creative expression”.

Battleship Potemkin and director Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 docudrama Bamako have been widely shown at film festivals in India. Sissako was honoured by the IFFK with a Lifetime Achievement Award this year.

Marian Alexander Baby, the general secretary of the state’s ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist), said that the film Beef had been denied permission “ostensibly because of its name, even though it has nothing to do with food choices”.

The former minister said that the permissions being denied to screen the films was an “absurd and lunatic attempt to derail IFFK” and the “latest example of the neo-fascist tendencies of the extreme authoritarian rule” under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the BJP.

“Artists, filmmakers and all democratic-minded citizens must raise their voices against this disgraceful move,” he said.

The Democratic Youth Federation of India, the youth organisation affiliated to the CPI(M), held a protest at one of the main venues of the film festival.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor stated that denying clearance to the films “suggests an extraordinary degree of cinematic illiteracy on the part of the bureaucracy”.

“Denying permission to some Palestinian films reflects bureaucratic over-cautiousness rather than the cultural breadth of vision that should be involved when it comes to world cinema,” the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said in a social media post.

He also claimed that the original list was much longer, but several clearances were granted after he intervened with Minister of Information and Broadcasting Ashwini Vaishnaw.