Kathmandu- In an age of high-octane spectacle, a quiet revolution in Indian storytelling is claiming global ground. Kathakar Ki Diary: The Story of Ordinary Lives, directed by Indian Revenue Service officer Anwesh, has been officially selected for the 17 th AL ESTE – San Marcos 2026. The crowd-funded film will screen across Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and France from June 18 to 28, 2026. Kathakar Ki Diary is not one story but five, each a pulse in the body of marginalized India. A cancer-stricken photographer racing a ticking clock to capture the world. A transwoman, portrayed by Yogesh Jadhav, whose pride and resilience have already moved activists and audiences to tears. A musician, played by Kapil Bhagwat, whose journey mirrors Anwesh’s own roots in performing arts. A tribal athlete fighting for excellence in the remote hills of Jharkhand and Odisha, embodied by Daniel. And a toddler, Baby Aarohi Chatterjee whose innocence punctures the frame.
Founded in 2008 as a bridge between Lima and Central and Eastern Europe, AL ESTE spent fifteen years teaching Peruvian and Latin American audiences to read the world through Romanian silences, Hungarian light, Polish dread. Since 2023, the bridge has widened. The festival now projects Latin American and Asian voices outward, with yearly editions in Colombia, Argentina, and France — a single curatorial spine stretched across continents, committed to discovery and dialogue over noise. After 16 years of independent fire, AL ESTE entered a new chapter , this year. Its alliance with the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the National University of San Marcos — the oldest university in the Americas, reframing the festival as a public act. This year’s theme, Monsters, the Impossible Beasts, rejects superstition. Here, the monster is a critical language. It speaks when institutions fail. Each epoch dreams of its monsters. In 2025, they return — two new Draculas from Radu Jude and Luc Besson, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. It is not merely a coincidence rather the body language of civilizational unease . That is the question animating the 17th AL ESTE – San Marcos International Film Festival, why are monsters returning to our screens now?
And into this observatory of unease walks a tale of ordinary lives, the film bureaucrat and filmmaker Anwesh’s crowdfunded Kathakar Ki ( Story teller’s) Diary, a non-linear and experimental film, which includes the contribution of over 200 artists including members of the primitive Hill Kharia tribe in Eastern India’s tribal belt of Odisha and Jharkhand.
The Al Este festival has built its name on “risk-taking” cinema — auteur-driven, de novo and experimental. By selecting Kathakar Ki Diary, it spotlights the radical beauty of the ordinary. Cinema has staged every beast — fangs, bolts, shadows. Rarely has it looked straight at the one that lives in our cells. Cancer, the monster without folklore, without castle, without cape. Anwesh confronts it in his film not with elegy, but with struggle and a joy so stubborn that it becomes contagious. The film does not beg for pity. It insists on life, frame by frame, breath by breath.
Film maker Anwesh who is also an Additional Commissioner in Indian Revenue Services,says , “In many ways, both filmmaking and public service – are about understanding people and lives, this is just a beginning, there is no greater joy than making an impact in the lives of people”.
