And it has nothing to do with Bollywood
Fazil Razak is not a household name — not yet. The Kerala-based filmmaker has made exactly two features. His debut, Thadavu (The Sentence), won the Audience Prize and Best Debut Director at the International Film Festival of Kerala in 2023. His second film, Moham, took the FIPRESCI Award for Best Malayalam Film by a Debut Director at IFFK 2025, and was named Second Best Indian Film at the 17th Bengaluru International Film Festival.
Now Moham — titled Desire internationally — has been selected for the main competition of the 48th Moscow International Film Festival, running April 16–23. It will compete against thirteen films representing ten countries for the festival’s top prize, the Golden St. George.
What the film is about
Desire centres on Amala, a young woman with a psychological condition living with her widowed mother in a rigid daily routine. Her mother works at a garment factory. Amala wanders the streets, eats the chapatis left for her each morning, and occasionally — on impulse — steals strangers’ motorcycles. One day she encounters Shanu, a man with hidden motives and a dangerous past. They leave together on a stolen bike.
Reviewers who have seen the film describe it as rooted in a very specific texture of provincial South India — intimate, unsentimental, and unlike anything coming out of mainstream Indian cinema. Desire is not a prestige production, not a social-issue drama with a tidy resolution. It sits closer to the tradition of Kerala’s quiet, observational cinema than to anything being made in Mumbai.
Why Moscow, and why does it matter
The Moscow International Film Festival is one of the oldest in the world — founded in 1935, predated only by Venice. Its recent history has been turbulent, and since 2022 its international lineup has shifted significantly. This year’s main competition draws from Italy, Spain, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Iran, Mongolia, China — and India. More than 1,500 films were submitted; around 200 will screen at the festival. Last year, the Golden St. George went to the Indian drama Elysium, directed by Pradeep Kuruba.
The festival has also broken with a long-standing tradition this year. For the first time, it moved away from the principle of one film per country — four nations have two films each in competition. Selection committee chair Sergei Lavrentyev framed the decision as a tribute to the late Polish director Andrzej Wajda, who chaired the MIFF jury in 1989 and argued that festivals should select films, not countries.
The company Desire keeps
Two other films in the competition stand out.
Iran’s entry, The Sky Is the Same Color Everywhere, is directed by Hamidreza Ghasemi, an Iranian filmmaker who trained at VGIK, Russia’s state film school, and won the Silver St. George for Best Short Film at MIFF 2022. His film, like Razak’s, deals with displacement and the gap between the life you live and the one you imagined.
South Korea sends Journey There by Kim Jin-yu, which premiered at Busan. It follows an elderly widow adjusting to life alone, and a Korean man adopted by a German family who has returned to find his birth mother. Two strangers, two kinds of loss, something forming between them that is neither friendship nor family but resembles both.
Three films from three very different cinematic traditions. What connects them is less obvious than their geography: each one is working at the margins of its own national cinema, telling stories that the mainstream of that industry tends not to tell.
What to watch for
The jury is chaired by Prasanna Vithanage of Sri Lanka — a director who adapted Tolstoy’s Resurrection in 1996 and Dostoevsky’s A Gentle Creature in 2012, and who has spent a career navigating the space between South Asian storytelling and the European literary tradition. His presence as jury president gives the competition an axis that feels appropriate for a programme this geographically wide.
For Fazil Razak, Moscow represents a significant step outward. Malayalam cinema has long punched above its weight on the festival circuit — but it rarely arrives at a competition of this scale. Whether Desire takes a prize or not, its selection is a signal worth paying attention to.
The 48th Moscow International Film Festival runs April 16–23, 2026. Main venue: Oktyabr Cinema Centre, Moscow.
