Tasveer 2026: Six days of South Asian cinema

Seattle's fall movie calendar is about to get a lot more interesting. The 21st Tasveer Film Festival & Market runs from Tuesday, October 13 to Sunday, October 18, and it's not just another local screening series: it's North America's premier South Asian film gathering and the world's first and only Oscar-qualifying South Asian film festival. Organized by the South Asian Film Festival of Seattle, the 2026 edition packs 136 films into six days, with 15 world premieres and a clear lean toward women-led stories — 50 women filmmakers, 16 countries and 27 languages are represented across the lineup, which draws from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Tibet, plus the diaspora.

If you're picking a night to drop in, the opening is the obvious place to start. Thursday, October 15 at 6 PM, the festival opens with Lali, a 110-minute Pakistani dark comedy by Sarmad Sultan Khoosat that follows Zeba and Sajawal, two people tied together by an inherited bond. The night is built as an event rather than a single screening, with a red-carpet walk and a reception to go with the film. Tickets for that session are $75. The centerpiece, MAYILAA, a 113-minute Indian film directed by Semmalar Annam, screens on Friday, October 16, and the whole thing wraps on Sunday, October 18 at 4 PM with Elephants in the Fog, Abinash Bikram Shah's 108-minute Nepalese film, for $50.

There's a whole other track running alongside the screenings, too. The Tasveer Film Market takes place from October 13 to 15 and is where the industry side comes in: live screenings, one-on-one meetings, panels and networking events. The headline there is the Tasveer Film Fund Pitch Day, backed by Netflix, where nine pre-selected projects compete and four winners each walk away with $35,000 and a guaranteed world premiere at the 2027 festival. There's also a Tasveer X AI programming strand for anyone following where tech and film are heading.

Depending on how much you want to see, there are a few ways to buy in. An all-access badge is $350 and covers every screening and the entire Film Market from Tuesday through Sunday. If you'd rather dip in and out, one-day passes are available for any single day of the festival, and individual screenings are priced separately. The jury is headed by Aparna Purohit, and the visiting list reads like a who's who of the region's cinema, with names like Aanch Khaneja, Kavi Raz, Lakshmi Iyengar and Sayani Gupta among them.

It's worth knowing the kind of filmmakers Tasveer has championed over the years. The festival has given a platform to Academy Award nominee Shaunak Sen, whose documentary All That Breathes premiered at Sundance in 2022 and took the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize; Mariam Ghani, whose first feature What We Left Unfinished premiered at the 2019 Berlinale; and Roya Sadat, the Afghan producer and director who staged the opera A Thousand Splendid Suns at the Seattle Opera in March 2023. For a festival that's been running since its first edition, that's a hell of a track record to bring to a week in Seattle.