LONDON — The London Indian Film Festival has found its closing-night headliner, and it is not a premiere. It is a 25-year-old cricket epic and the actor-producer who bet his career on it.
Aamir Khan will sit for a rare on-stage conversation at BFI Southbank on July 16 to close the festival’s 17th edition, organizers announced Tuesday. Four days earlier, on July 12, a 25th-anniversary screening of “Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India” takes over the BFI IMAX, the largest cinema screen in Britain.
The pairing is the spine of a programme that, as Variety reported, runs July 9 through 19 across London, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Bradford, the widest footprint in the event’s history. The commercial logic is familiar to anyone who has watched festival economics up close. Legacy titles sell out IMAX auditoriums, and the receipts, and the photographs, buy attention for a slate of first features that has none yet.
In a statement released through the festival, Khan said it was “hard to put into words what this journey has meant,” recalling a team that “made the film with a lot of belief, passion and honesty, never imagining the kind of love it would receive.”
Ashutosh Gowariker’s colonial-era epic was the first production out of Aamir Khan’s own banner, a near four-hour gamble about drought-stricken villagers staking their future on a cricket match against their British occupiers. It became only the third Indian film nominated for the best foreign-language film Academy Award, losing in 2002 to Bosnia’s “No Man’s Land,” and it has functioned ever since as the reference point producers reach for when pitching Hindi cinema to the world.
Festival director Cary Rajinder Sawhney, announcing the line-up on the festival’s official programme, said the team was “delighted to share the celebration of the 25th anniversary of Lagaan” and to show the film “on the UK’s largest IMAX screen with major actor producer Aamir Khan present to talk about its making.”
The opening night belongs to new work. “52 Blue,” directed by Ali El Arabi and starring Adil Hussain and Neha Dhupia, receives its European premiere at BFI Southbank on July 9 before travelling to Birmingham, Sheffield and Greater London. Sawhney called it “a riveting and inspirational film about youth finding a way against impossible odds,” one that seemed to him to cut against “these seemingly despondent times.”
Between those bookends sits a Central Gala on July 11 that reunites the full cast of “Goodness Gracious Me,” the BBC sketch comedy that rewired how British Asians saw themselves on television in the late 1990s. Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Nina Wadia and Kulvinder Ghir are expected on stage together with writer Anil Gupta, an alignment that has barely happened since the show went off the air.
The archival coup of the programme may be the smallest title on it. “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones,” Pradip Krishen’s 1989 campus comedy written by and featuring Arundhati Roy years before her Booker Prize, gets its UK premiere in a restored 4K version at BFI Southbank and HOME Manchester. Somewhere in its supporting cast is a very young Shah Rukh Khan, still years away from being Shah Rukh Khan.
The discovery slate reaches well beyond Bollywood. Jitank Singh Gurjar’s “In Search of the Sky” arrives from Toronto for screenings in London and Birmingham, while two Bangladeshi films out of Rotterdam, Rezwan Shahriar Sumit’s Big Screen Competition winner “Master” and Mejbaur Rahman Sumon’s “Roid,” premiere at the ICA in London and the Midlands Arts Centre.
There is also a first. The festival’s India’s AI and Film Future event at BFI Southbank on July 11 is billed as Europe’s inaugural showcase of Indian films made with artificial intelligence inside the creative process, a subject most festivals are still circling warily. Sawhney pointed to the breadth of state-by-state indie premieres and said it was “great to see the festival expanding its footprint this year beyond London.”
For Indian cinema, the UK circuit is becoming less a shop window than a distribution channel in its own right. The diaspora theatrical market has carried Hindi and Tamil releases through weak domestic stretches, and the festival’s five-city expansion tracks exactly where those audiences live. It lands weeks after Indian stars closed out the Cannes red carpet in May, a season in which the festival circuit has done more for Indian cinema’s global positioning than any single theatrical release.
What the festival has not said is whether Khan arrives with news. There is no word on whether the IMAX evening precedes a wider anniversary re-release of “Lagaan,” no detail on what the expansion into three new cities costs or who underwrites it, and no indication of whether Khan’s conversation, programmed as a career-spanning session, doubles as a platform for his next slate. The organizers did not address those questions in Tuesday’s announcement.
Khan, for his part, framed the anniversary as something that still surprises him. To see “Lagaan” connect with audiences “across generations and across geographies,” he said, “is very special.” The festival has booked its biggest screen and its closing night on the bet that he is right.
