The Film Festival of The Asian Literary Festival

There is a particular kind of magic that happens when a story leaps from the page to the screen — when a novelist’s carefully chosen words become light, movement, and sound. SCREEN, the film festival of The Asian Literary Festival (ALF), was born out of precisely this conviction: that literature and cinema are not rival arts but intimate companions, each illuminating the other in ways neither can achieve alone.

Conceived as an integral strand of the ALF’s expanding cultural universe, SCREEN brings together filmmakers, authors, screenwriters, and audiences to explore the enduring — and evolving — relationship between the written word and the moving image. In a world saturated with content, SCREEN insists on something rarer: depth. It asks not merely what is being shown, but what is being said, and why it matters.

A Festival Born of Literary Values

ALF was founded on a radical premise: that great literature belongs to everyone, not only to the privileged few with access to prestigious cultural institutions. Sri Lanka’s first completely free international literary festival, ALF has grown from its roots in Gampaha into a genuinely global enterprise, with editions in Brussels, Bhubaneswar, Nairobi, Sejny, and the Maldives. Its 2025–2026 season is unified by the theme Threads of Tomorrow — an acknowledgement that the stories we tell today will shape the world our children inhabit.

SCREEN inherits these values wholesale. Its programming is not built around box-office statistics or streaming algorithms. Instead, it privileges films that carry the weight and intentionality of literary fiction: works that are willing to sit with complexity, to resist easy resolution, and to trust their audiences with difficult truths. Whether the film in question is an adaptation of a celebrated novel, a documentary rooted in rigorous narrative nonfiction, or an original screenplay that reads as literature in its own right, SCREEN asks the same fundamental question: does this film have something genuine to say?

The Global Dimension

Much like ALF itself, SCREEN is constitutionally international. The festival reflects ALF’s founding vision of democratising literature across borders — a vision articulated by ALF’s founder and CEO Pramudith D. Rupasinghe, himself a writer who has made a practice of crossing boundaries. Known as a “Writer Without Borders,” Rupasinghe has set his novels in pre-conflict Ukraine, during the West African Ebola crisis, and across the varied landscapes encountered in decades of humanitarian work. This methodology — immersive, empathetic, resolutely outward-looking — permeates SCREEN’s curatorial philosophy.

The festival actively seeks films from underrepresented cinemas: from South and Southeast Asia, from sub-Saharan Africa, from Eastern Europe and the broader post-Soviet world. It is suspicious of the assumption that good cinema has a single accent, and it works deliberately against the cultural hierarchies that too often determine which stories receive international distribution and which do not. A debut film from a Sri Lankan village deserves the same serious attention as a prestige production from a major European studio, and SCREEN’s programme is designed to make that argument viscerally, film by film.

Conversations Across Forms

One of SCREEN’s most distinctive features is its insistence on dialogue — not merely between films, but between films and the writers, thinkers, and practitioners who gather at ALF each year. Panel discussions and masterclasses place novelists alongside screenwriters, documentary subjects alongside the journalists who inspired their stories. These conversations resist the hierarchy that sometimes places cinema above or below literature; instead, they treat both forms as equal participants in the project of making sense of the world.

The festival also serves as a space for exploring what is gained — and what is inevitably lost — in the translation from page to screen. Adaptation is one of the oldest and most contentious conversations in both literary and cinematic culture, and SCREEN approaches it without ideology, celebrating both faithful interpretations and radical reimaginings, provided both demonstrate genuine artistic ambition.

Why SCREEN Matters Now

We live in an era of unprecedented image production and, paradoxically, unprecedented narrative poverty. Stories are everywhere; genuine storytelling is harder to find. SCREEN exists as a corrective — a curated space in which cinema is asked to rise to the standards of serious literature: to be precise, to be honest, to be brave.

In doing so, SCREEN does not merely enrich the ALF programme. It advances a larger argument: that the cultures and communities most often rendered invisible by mainstream media have extraordinary stories to tell, and that finding the right form — whether novel, poem, or film — to tell those stories is among the most urgent work of our time.

SCREEN is, in the end, what all great festivals aspire to be: not an event, but a conversation. One that begins on screen, continues in the corridors and courtyards of the festival, and — if the films do their work — carries on long after the lights come back up.

Mohan Dharmaratne