Hello hello Rainmatter community!
This year has been undeniably shocking on a environmental and humanitarian front; I’m sure all of you reading are feeling the profoundness of this point in history with a shared heaviness.
At ALT EFF, we are meeting our audience there, in that messy space of being human in a changing world. At this time of the year, between festival editions, we are focused on bringing community together monthly at ALT EFF Film Club (happening across 12 cities: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Panjim-Goa and Pune). Film Club is a safe space to explore climate grief and overwhelm, and hope and actions, using film as a central lens.
In this update, I want to brief you all on the happenings of our 6th annual film festival, which took place December 4-14, 2025 and share our 2025 Annual Report. I am late in getting this report out, so please don’t mind! I am back to work with a one year old and finding things to be taking longer than usual 
**Key Progress on our Goals **
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In 2025, we launched ALT EFF Film Fund with the generous support of Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India. We selected a filmmaker via our wonderful partners at Green Stories, Asia’s premier pitch and mentoring event for environmental filmmakers. We aim to grow Film Fund into a lasting corpus of funds that can resource India’s best environmental stories.
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ALT EFF Curations is the service arm of our organisation. This is a growing offering to embed environmental stories into more cultural (and corporate!) events around India. If you have an event or gathering coming up, come speak to us! We can help you program in a film or a series of films that are topical, relevant and in local Indian languages. This is a new area of potential collaboration for anyone reading!
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ALT EFF Film Club is in its 3rd season, continuing to bring together like minded community members to meet, share and be vulnerable together of these complex climate issues. And of course, witness great cinema! Last year in our 2nd season, along with the urban screenings, we piloted a rural, travelling Film Club in Shillong, Meghalaya, with Sauramandala Foundation; Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu with Keystone Foundation; and Koinpur, Odisha with Gram Vikas.
ALT EFF 2025
Our annual film festival, held pan-India and internationally Dec 4-14, 2025, was a big success! The report linked here provides ample detail, photos, stats, feedback, quotes and more, but I will also delineate a highlight reel:
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STATS:: 86 films representing 39 countries; 3 Flagship ALT EFF events, 45 decentralised screenings, 300 Watch Party registrations (more on that later!)
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FLAGSHIP EVENTS: Till this edition, ALT EFF festival events were strictly in a decentralised model across India (and some globally), in partnership with cultural hubs, community groups, NGOs and more, whom we term ‘Screening Partners’. Last year, in addition to our decentralised events, we hosted a Curtain Raiser in Mumbai and 2 weekend-long in Mumbai and Bengaluru. These events were our opportunity to platform our amazing network of filmmakers, artists and changemakers. We programmed over 20 workshops/panel discussions and 18 live filmmaker Q&As, alongside screenings dozens and dozens of films, and creating spaces for collaborative art projects to unfold. These events were buzzing!
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WATCH PARTIES: A Watch Party is a start to finish kit provided by ALT EFF to audiences worldwide. A host gets to pick from a selection of curations and receives design templates to create invitations and custom collateral for promotion, along with a detailed Hosting Toolkit that guides them on how to host the event and how to engage audiences in rich conversation (including film-specific conversation prompts). In 2025, we piloted Watch Parties and will continue to grow this offering. It really hits the scale we are looking.
PROGRAMMING: Alongside a program of 86 films, the annual festival included dozens of alternate way to engage, from a drumming circle, to immersive VR experience, to a live audio/visual journey from Elsewhere in India, to a #letterstoEarth workshops and so much more. We invite you to explore all the programming from our Flagships events in Mumbai and Bengaluru by following the preceding links.
Festival Report / Annual Report
I invite you all to open up our Annual Report and dive into the photos, the quotes, the stories and the learnings that defined 2025. Please find the report here and enjoy reading! Feel free to share far and wide
Take care everyone and keep your heads up! Together, as a community of thinkers, feelers and do-ers, we can shape the year ahead with joy, progress and connection.
Many cheers,
Laura Christie Khanna, ALT EFF’s Producer