Vidyut Jain's Blog

The first thing that hits you is the cold. Not the polite, air-conditioned chill of a Mumbai premiere, but the real, lung-filling cold of Darjeeling at 6,800 feet. I stood there on the steps of the Darjeeling Railway Station at five in the morning, watching my breath turn to mist, wondering if any of this was actually happening.

Three years ago, this was a joke over too many pegs of Old Monk at Glenary’s. “Darjeeling needs a film festival,” someone had said, and we’d all laughed into our glasses. Now, there were banners strung across Mall Road—Darjeeling International Film Festival, Inaugural Edition—flapping in a wind that smelled of pine and diesel from the toy train.

The festival office was a converted tea estate manager’s bungalow on Lebong Cart Road. My “team” consisted of Tenzing, a local filmmaker who’d shot one documentary about snow leopards and considered himself the Scorsese of the Himalayas; Mrs. Ghosh, a retired English teacher who handled logistics with the terrifying efficiency of a general; and Priya, a sound engineer from Kolkata who’d come for a week and stayed for three months because, as she put it, “The hills mess with your exit strategy.”

We had forty-seven films from twenty-two countries. Forty-seven. I’d expected maybe fifteen submissions, mostly from Kolkata and a few earnest European students who’d heard “Himalayas” and thought “spiritual.” Instead, we had a Mongolian western, a Iranian family drama shot entirely in a single apartment, and a surrealist animation from Estonia about a man who turns into a steam locomotive. The locomotive one felt appropriate.

The opening night was held at the Darjeeling Gymkhana Club, a building that looked like a Victorian gentleman who’d had too much to drink and leaned against the mountain for support. The projector was borrowed from Siliguri. The screen was handmade by Tenzing’s cousin using white bedsheets stitched together. At 6:30 PM, as the Kanchenjunga turned pink in the alpenglow, I stood in front of two hundred folding chairs and introduced our first film.

The power cut out twice.

The first time, during the Mongolian western, someone in the audience started singing a Nepali folk song, and within minutes the whole hall had joined in, clapping in rhythm, until the generator coughed back to life. The second time, during a particularly tense scene in the Iranian drama, the silence stretched so long that you could hear the wind in the deodars outside, and somehow that silence became part of the film.

By day three, the festival had developed its own rhythm. Mornings were for screenings at the old Capitol Cinema on Laden La Road, a theater that had shown Sholay in 1975 and hadn’t changed the seats since. Afternoons were for walks—filmmakers from Buenos Aires and Busan gasping up the steep lanes, stopping for momos and ginger tea, arguing about aspect ratios while clouds rolled through the bazaar below them. Evenings were for the Gymkhana, for arguments that turned into friendships over bottles of beer kept cold in mountain streams.

I remember the Japanese director, Yamamoto, standing on Chowrasta at dawn, watching the sunrise. He didn’t speak for twenty minutes. Then he turned to me and said, “My film is about a man who cannot leave his house. Here, I understand why he would want to stay inside. And why he must go out.”

The closing ceremony was simple. No red carpet—just a carpet, red once, now more of a faded maroon. We gave out wooden plaques carved by local artisans, shaped like film reels with mountain peaks in the center. The Estonian animator cried when she received hers. The Iranian director traded his plaque for a bottle of local orange wine with a Brazilian documentarian. Tenzing announced that next year we would have a competition section, and everyone cheered, though we had no money and no venue confirmed.

That night, after everyone had left or collapsed, I walked alone down Mall Road. The toy train’s whistle echoed somewhere in the dark. The Kanchenjunga was invisible, wrapped in black clouds, but I knew it was there. Somewhere above me, a dog barked, and a light went on in a window high on the ridge.

I thought about all the things that had gone wrong—the power cuts, the missed flight that stranded our French critic in Bagdogra, the argument with the hotel owner who didn’t understand why filmmakers needed Wi-Fi at 2 AM. I thought about the Japanese director’s sunrise, and the Nepali folk song in the darkened hall, and the Estonian woman crying over a piece of carved wood.

We’d done it. The Darjeeling International Film Festival existed now. It was small, and cold, and slightly broken, and utterly beautiful.

I went back to the office—Mrs. Ghosh’s bungalow—and found Priya asleep on a pile of uncollected badges, Tenzing editing footage of the festival on his laptop, and a pot of tea still warm on the stove. Outside, the first light was touching the top of the world.

I poured a cup and sat down to write the report for next year’s sponsors. I wrote: The festival was a success. Attendance exceeded expectations. The international community responded enthusiastically.

Then I crossed it out and wrote the truth: We showed films in the shadow of the third highest mountain in the world. The power failed. Nobody cared. We will do it again.