India’s in style Mumbai Movie Pageant, operated by the Mumbai Academy of Shifting Picture (MAMI), is not going to have a 2025 version.

In an announcement posted to X on Monday, competition director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, who can be India’s main movie preservation activist, wrote: “That is to tell you that the 2025 version of MAMI Mumbai Movie Pageant is not going to happen as we’re within the technique of revamping the competition with a dynamic imaginative and prescient and a brand new workforce to make sure that the competition returns as a premier showcase for one of the best of impartial, regional and basic cinema from India and around the globe. We’re working diligently to reschedule the competition and can announce the brand new dates for the 2026 version as quickly as potential. Thanks to your understanding and assist.”

That is the most recent hiccup for a competition that has had its fair proportion of them because it was based in 1997. The competition got here near collapse after the withdrawal of Reliance Leisure as a sponsor in 2014 and American Specific in 2013. At the moment, MAMI rescued the occasion by way of a crowdfunding enchantment that was largely answered by main celeb names from the Bollywood business. In 2015, the competition locked in Reliance Jio Infocomm and Star India as key sponsors.

The competition went on a three-year COVID and logistics-related absence and returned in 2023 with a hub, a refreshed govt workforce and a bunch of plans, together with reviving the long-dormant market. Nonetheless, billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Jio departed as title sponsor, resulting in a truncated 2024 version.

Eminent Indian filmmaker Hansal Mehta, whose “Aligarh” and “The Buckingham Murders” have opened the competition previously, posted on X: “It’s a merciless irony that Mumbai draped within the glitz of being India’s monetary and cinematic capital can not hold alive a movie competition of its personal. Deserted by the self-appointed gatekeepers of cinema who chased shinier phases and safer bets it was left within the arms of some passionate believers to run on pure religion. And now that fragile flame has been snuffed out. No ceremony. No outrage. Only a sluggish, silent forgetting. What ought to have been a cultural cornerstone has been decreased to a footnote – one other casualty of apathy dressed as progress.”

Mehta’s compatriot Praveen Morchhale, whose “Strolling With the Wind” performed at Camerimage and Fribourg and received at India’s Nationwide Movie Awards, posted. “What a paradox. Mumbai, residence to billionaires, Bollywood, and stars who stroll Cannes purple carpets, can’t assist its personal movie competition. Govts use cinema for personal causes then abandon it. Filmmakers who imagine in telling the reality undergo. Will we let @MumbaiFilmFest fade away? SAD”