Anurag Kashyap at MIFFest: a jury president hunting for a cinematic language that hasn't been colonised

At the Malaysia International Film Festival on 21 July 2026, the Indian director Anurag Kashyap opened his jury presidency by naming the thing he is looking for. Variety reported from Kuala Lumpur that Kashyap, in town for the festival's opening run and the world of his new feature "Bandar," told assembled press he was searching for "a new cinematic language." It is a phrase that has been used by enough directors over the decades to sound threadbare. Coming from Kashyap, who has spent two decades bending Hindi indie and mainstream cinema into shapes the Bollywood establishment did not ask for, it lands differently.

The framing matters because "Bandar" is the work that brings him back to the director's chair. His recent years have been defined as much by production and acting credits as by directing, and a new feature from him is itself an event. But the MIFFest jury position is the more interesting institutional fact. A festival in Kuala Lumpur, sitting inside a Southeast Asian industry that has spent the last decade building co-production muscle, has handed its verdict to a director whose career was made in the long shadow of one state-supported industry and who has spent most of that career arguing with it.

What a jury president is for, and what Kashyap has said it is for

Kashyap's stated brief is not adjudication. It is recruitment. Variety's reporting makes clear he is using the platform to push filmmakers, and the regional industry that hosts them, toward forms of expression that resist the easy importation of dominant templates: the Bollywood song-and-dance grammar, the Korean thriller conventions now travelling the festival circuit, the prestige-America indie voice that colonises the international festival podium. He is not, on the available reporting, rejecting those languages wholesale. He is asking who else is building one.

That posture sits in a long tradition of festival juries that use their verdict as a manifesto. Cannes juries have done it, Berlin has done it, and the practice travels. What is distinctive about Kashyap's version is its insistence on language rather than theme. He is not announcing a political programme or a thematic lane. He is asking, in effect, whether Southeast Asian and South Asian cinema have a vocabulary yet that the global festival circuit has not already catalogued.

The phrase carries a quiet rebuke. The international festival system, for all its celebration of regional cinema, has a habit of rewarding films that fit the categories it has already learned to recognise: trauma realism, magical-realist allegory, the slow-burn domestic. Kashyap's call is for something the system has not yet learned how to name.

What 'Bandar' tells us about where he himself is going

"Bandar" is the proof-of-concept for his own argument. Variety's coverage of the festival frames it as Kashyap's return to directing, and the title invites the obvious reading: bandar is Hindi for monkey, and the metaphor of mimicry, performance, imitation, is the oldest in the Indian literary cupboard. A director who has made a career out of bending popular Hindi cinema into noir, gangster epic, and existential chamber drama returning to the camera with a film that thematically circles imitation is signalling something.

The available reporting does not specify the plot. It does not need to. The signal is the choice. Kashyap has said elsewhere in his career that he makes films to find out what he thinks; the body of work supports that. A new film with a title that asks what it means to perform, made by a director who has spent two decades performing the role of rebel insider inside the Hindi industry, is itself a kind of statement about language.

The festival timing compounds the signal. He is premiering (or at least presenting) the work while simultaneously judging others. That is a delicate institutional posture, and it suggests Kashyap sees MIFFest not as a marketplace for his film but as a forum for a larger argument about the future of the cinema he comes from and the cinema the festival represents.

Why Kuala Lumpur, why now

MIFFest is not yet in the top tier of Asian festival destinations. It sits behind Busan, Tokyo, and Shanghai in brand recognition. It sits in front of a long tail of newer Asian festivals whose ambitions exceed their global footprint. What it has, and what made Kashyap's jury presidency legible, is a regional brief: a platform explicitly oriented toward Southeast Asian and South Asian cinema and the diaspora between them.

That positioning matters. The Asian festival circuit has bifurcated. The prestige Asian festivals track global cinema in general, with Asian films as a distinguished subset. A smaller tier of newer festivals is making the opposite bet: that there is an audience and an industry whose centre of gravity sits inside the region, and that the films it makes deserve a dedicated showcase rather than a global one.

Kashyap's jury presidency fits the second bet. A director who broke through on the international festival circuit and has spent the years since cultivating a regional reputation that does not depend on Western validation is a useful figurehead for a festival making exactly that case. The MIFFest organisers, on the available reporting, want to be a node in a regional network, not a stop on a global circuit. Kashyap is the kind of jury president who can credibly perform that role.

The counter-read and the stakes

The honest counterpoint: festival-jury rhetoric is cheap, and a director's call for "a new cinematic language" can read as a generational routine rather than a programme. The phrase does not bind anyone to deliver anything. The jury's verdict, when it comes, will be a film with a prize attached, not a manifesto enforced.

What is harder to dismiss is the structural fact. Southeast Asian cinema is, in 2026, in a stronger production position than at any previous point in the festival era. Co-production treaties across ASEAN have thickened. Regional streaming platforms have created demand for content that does not travel through Hollywood or the Korean majors. A jury president with Kashyap's track record using the platform to ask regional filmmakers to find a vocabulary the system does not already recognise is, at minimum, pointing at something real.

The stakes are concrete. If MIFFest, under this kind of rhetorical brief, can build the kind of catalogue that distinguishes a festival from a market, the regional industry gains an institutional asset that survives any single jury's tenure. If it cannot, the festival becomes another stop on the global circuit, and the call for a new language becomes the kind of keynote that everyone applauds and no one acts on.

The reading this publication finds most defensible is the modest one: Kashyap is using a jury presidency the way experienced festival figures use jury presidencies, as a platform to set an agenda he could not set from a producer's chair. Whether the films the jury rewards actually break new ground is a question the festival's 2026 edition will begin to answer. The phrase is the opening bid. The films are the receipts.

Desk note: Monexus treats MIFFest coverage as regional industry reporting rather than celebrity profile. Wire framing of Kashyap tends to centre either his Bollywood-defector reputation or his festival-circuit cachet; this piece reads his jury presidency as institutional positioning inside a Southeast Asian festival ecosystem that is still building its centre of gravity.