The 17th Tasveer South Asian Film Festival begins this week. The Seattle-based festival runs from November 3rd to November 20th and will be a hybrid festival featuring some of the year’s best South Asian stories in film.

TSAFF programs films, shorts, and events that spotlight South Asian stories and culture with an emphasis on showcasing work that explores social justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, and gender equality.

The festival’s Opening Night Gala film on November 3rd is the Tribeca-debuted heist comedy Four Samosas. TSAFF describes the film as follows:

Four Samosas tells the story of creatively blocked and wannabe rapper Vinny (Potula), who devises a plan with his friends to steal his soon-to-be-married ex-girlfriend's family diamonds from her father's supermarket safe in order to stop the wedding.

For this screening, Directed by Ravi Kapoor and the film’s actors Venk Potula, Sonal Shah, Sharmita Bhattacharya, Nirvan Patnaik, and Karan Soni will all be in attendance and will participate in a Q&A after the screening.

Closing the festival on November 13th will be the World Premiere presentations of the Tasveer Film Fund winners. In partnership with Netflix, TSAFF aims to help fund South Asian storytelling, and the films Bepar, Dos Bros Force, and Zindagi Dobara are products of the festival’s second annual film fund award.

Programming Director Lucy Mukerjee, who oversees the Tasveer Film Fund program, states “every year the amount of the grants has grown, so for the future, I’d like to see that continue to grow.” As funding increases, TSAFF aims to eventually be able to fully fund film projects.

The Closing Gala World Premiere screenings will be followed by an Awards Ceremony to present prizes to the best films at this year's festival.

This year in total, TSAFF will present over 100 films, including the Cannes award-winning documentary All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen will be in attendance), Goldfish (North American Premiere with director Kalki Koechlin and actor Deepti Naval in attendance), and the World Premiere of Pravesh Kumar's comedy film Little English.

“This year feels like a moment of growth because it’s back in person, as well as the online portion,” Lucy explains in an interview you can watch here. “So it feels like a milestone.”

When the festival was estabilshed in 2002, Co-founder and Festival Director Rita Meher says they wanted to create a space for South Asian representation and to effectively bring awareness for what it means to be South Asian. She states in this interview, “We wanted to use film as a tool to do that, to dispel stereotypes, to create a bridge between the bigger, wider community.”

This objective continues today. In accommodating an online option for the festival during Covid, Rita says their reach went from approximately 5,000 attendees a week to around 45,000 views, putting TSAFF on the map as a nationally recognized festival.

“We want to become the ultimate Sundance or Tribeca of South Asian film festivals,” she says, and this year’s 17th edition of the festival is one more step closer to that goal.

You can find more information as well as ticket and event pass information on the official Tasveer South Asian Film Festival website.