Gardens of Care
Spore hosts
Save the Date
Subkontinental
South Asian Cinema Week — Film Screenings, Discussion and Food
30. January 2026
18.00-23.00
18.00-23.00
7. February 2026
17.00-21.30
17.00-21.30
Save the Date
For free
for adults
in English/multilingual
This independent platform for South Asian cinema seeks to question dominant representations, challenge assumptions, and to open space for deeper, more nuanced understandings of the region’s peoples, politics, cultures, and identities. Its aim is to help shift the frames through which South Asia has been historically viewed, creating room for layered portrayals of its complexities, contradictions, and untold stories, narratives too often softened, exoticized, or ignored. The South Asian Cinema Week will take place in different venues, one of them is Spore Initiative, you can find more info following this link.
January 30 — Opening Night
6 – 8.25 pm: Film Screening of "Tees"
Follwed by Food and Drinks till 11 pm
TEES
(Drama, Science Fiction / 142 Min.)
The film depicts over 90 years in the life of a middle-class Muslim family spanning three generations. In 2042, young sex worker Anhad Draboo seeks contact with a commission reader after his manuscript is rejected. In 2018, lawyer Zia Draboo fails to buy an apartment due to discrimination. In 1989/90, news anchor Ayesha in Srinagar asks for help for her husband, who is threatened by unrest.
February 7 — Closing Night of the South Asian Cinema Week
5 – 6.30 pm
Screening of two Short Films: "Velipādu: The Revelation" & "Champaran mutton"
7.30 – 9.55 pm
Film Screening of "Paradise"
PARADISE
(Drama / 92 Min.)
Prasanna Vithanage's acclaimed Sri Lankan-Indian film from 2023 highlights a couple's strained marriage against the backdrop of Sri Lanka's economic crisis and Ramayana Trail tourism, testing their relationship in the face of societal and personal challenges. The film won the Kim Jiseok Award in Busan and explores cultural myths, political unrest, and relationship dynamics through a visually stunning, multilingual narrative.
Berlin, with its own histories of migration, rupture, and becoming, offers a resonant space for this dialogue. Here, the festival can engage a critical audience and diasporic communities, creating encounters that are at once local and transnational.
By bringing together a range of films from independent filmmakers and radical storytellers, the festival highlights urgent issues around gender, caste, minorities, migration, displacement, and political repressions. Over two evenings at Spore, we invite audiences to engage critically, to listen differently, and to imagine otherwise.
This is for anyone interested in independent film in general, south Asian themes, broader socio/political questions as well as questions about representation. Prior knowledge of the South Asian context would allow for a deeper engagement with the films but is not required. We hope to bridge any knowledge gaps through the Q & A sessions with the directors as well as how we describe the programming and curation.
Organized in conjunction with Spore and Subkontinent.
