Porshi
Chandrasish Ray
India. 2025. 100 min

Like any other metropolitan city, Kolkata is a mix of diverse people. Bappa works as a supervisor in a movers-and-packers company owned by Ratan, his boss, who is almost torment personified. Bappa’s girlfriend, Monika, is running around the city in pursuit of a government job she has already cleared but has not yet received the offer letter for. Choto, a 22-year-old truck driver working under Bappa, is a village boy struggling to discover his own sense of right and wrong amid the bustle of this grey city. Siuli is a homemaker, raising two children and dealing with a drunken husband, never having imagined that her life would be trapped within the claustrophobia of four walls.
We are all neighbours – Porshi (in Bengali) – to one another in some way or the other. We never know when we cross paths with a neighbour whose face we may not even recognize. Porshi (Neighbours, in english) is a palette of independent colours who never realized that, together, they could form a rainbow.

The Muralist
Sengedorj Janchivdorj
Mongolia. 2025. 116 min

Baya, a weather-worn muralist who spent his glory years in Europe, has drifted back to Ulaanbaatar with nothing but a rickety rooftop tent, a box of fading paints and Dolingor, the stray that shadows his every step. Each dawn he rappels down an abandoned Soviet-era factory wall, splashing mythic Mongolian landscapes across the crumbling concrete while a sardonic red balloon—equal parts conscience and comic Greek chorus—floats overhead.
When city officials announce the site will be bulldozed for a turkey farm, Baya digs in, certain this mural will be his life’s summa. His only allies are Tömö, a curious herder boy who’s never owned a crayon, and Kazu, a Japanese photo-journalist whose lens turns Baya’s anonymity into sudden global intrigue. Their fragile coalition clashes with bureaucrats and developers, but the deeper fight is inside Baya: a decades-old guilt over the wife and daughter he abandoned for art.
Drawing on surreal realism and long, breathing takes that keep us at the artist’s elbow, director J. Sengedorj weaves Mongolia’s gritty urban present with its shamanic inner world. The Muralist becomes a hymn to imagination’s stubborn survival—whether in spray-painted saints, a boy’s first charcoal line, or the quiet forgiveness that can still bloom on a ruined wall.