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Tenzin Dalha, at the Toronto Film Festival with Jennifer Peedom’s Apple original Film “Tenzing,” has been revealed as the male lead in Bengali-language thriller “Chheledhora,” opposite Swastika Mukherjee.

His casting had been withheld when the Indo-American production was first announced earlier this year, with producers naming only Mukherjee at that point.

“Tenzing,” a gala presentation at TIFF, features Genden Phuntsok as legendary mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, with Tom Hiddleston, Willem Dafoe and Caitríona Balfe also in the cast. A limited theatrical run begins Oct. 9, with global streaming on Apple TV following Oct. 16.

In “Chheledhora,” written and directed by Shieladitya Moulik – whose credits include “Sweater” and “Surjo” – Dalha and Mukherjee anchor a story set off by an act of parental defiance. Mukherjee plays Brishti, a divorced mother who “steals” her own daughter for a birthday outing, only for the child to be genuinely abducted. The discovery then draws a group of deeply flawed adults and their children into an erratic journey through Northeast India, where the youngest characters gradually emerge as the moral compass for the adults around them. Filmed extensively in Arunachal Pradesh’s Ziro Valley, the production combines family drama, thriller elements and dark humor with the cultural texture of India’s Northeast. It is currently in post-production.

“We made a very conscious decision not to announce Tenzin when we first revealed ‘Chheledhora,’” said Ann Mukherjee, founder of Indo-American production company Sita22 Films. “We knew he had this extraordinary international moment ahead of him with ‘Tenzing,’ and TIFF felt like exactly the right time for audiences to discover another side of him. Tenzin possesses a quiet emotional intelligence and restraint that makes him a fascinating counterpoint to Swastika’s tremendous emotional force. Their chemistry is central to the film.”

Mukherjee described “Chheledhora” as a film that makes both a physical and emotional journey into India’s Northeast. “We want to tell stories that are deeply rooted in India but aren’t constrained by conventional ideas of language, geography or identity,” she said.

Dalha said it felt “particularly special” to be discussing one project while at the festival for another. “They are completely different films, yet rooted in human grit, empathy, the lengths to which humans are capable of going for people they love,” he said. “What drew me to ‘Chheledhora’ was Shieladitya’s writing. His understanding of humans as imperfect complex beings and looking at life beyond the dichotomy of individuals as good or bad. He wrote these beautiful broken young adult characters making questionable choices for their loved ones.”

The actor described Mukherjee as “a force of nature in frame and a force of joy on set,” adding that the Arunachal landscape shaped the film’s atmosphere from the outset. “Shooting in Ziro and Arunachal Pradesh provided the perfect backdrop for a thriller, and the weather set the tone right for the ambience,” he said.

The film is produced by Ann Mukherjee for Sita22 Films, with Jitin Hingorani as co-producer and creative producer, Dhanraj Sawant as executive producer and Priyangi Borthakur as supervising producer. Italian cinematographer Vincenzo Condorelli shot the film.

“The idea was never to make a Bengali film that simply happens to travel to the Northeast,” said Hingorani, who also heads content and development at Sita22 Films. “The journey changes these characters, and the Northeast becomes part of the film’s emotional language. Pairing Swastika and Tenzin gives us two performers coming from very different cinematic and cultural energies, and that tension is part of what makes the film so exciting. At Sita22, our mandate is to find stories that can be hyper-local and super-global at the same time, and ‘Chheledhora’ embodies that philosophy beautifully.”

The 31st Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) has announced the first-ever Korea visit by Alfonso Cuarón, alongside a dedicated spotlight on nine films from European women and genderqueer filmmakers.

Cuarón, who has won the Academy Award for best director twice, for “Gravity” (2013) and “Roma” (2018), also holds the Venice Film Festival’s best screenplay prize for “Y Tu Mamá También” (2001) and a Golden Lion for “Roma.” He first caught Hollywood’s attention with “Y Tu Mamá También,” a portrait of youth and desire, before taking “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004) in a moodier, more personal visual direction than the series had gone before, and later used extended long takes in “Children of Men” (2007) to pull audiences directly into a world at war. He is expected to appear at BIFF’s opening ceremony and will sit down for an extended conversation with festivalgoers about the camera language and instincts behind his films. An Imax screening of “Gravity,” co-written with his son, filmmaker Jonás Cuarón, will also be at the festival.

Jonás Cuarón’s latest feature, “Campeón Gabacho,” will have its Asian premiere in the World Cinema section, followed by a post-screening Q&A. Since writing on “Gravity,” the younger Cuarón has built his own filmography with “Desierto” (2015) and “Chupa” (2023). “Campeón Gabacho,” starring Juan Daniel García Treviño, Leslie Grace, Rubén Blades, Eddie Marsan, Rosario Dawson and Cheech Marin, follows a Mexican immigrant building a life in the United States, and was produced by Jonás Cuarón alongside his father and Gabriela Rodriguez under their Esperanto Filmoj banner, with Nicolás Celis also producing.

Elsewhere at the festival, BIFF is showcasing “Europe! Voices of Women+ in Film,” a program run with the European Film Promotion (EFP), spotlighting nine officially selected films through targeted promotion and industry networking. The lineup spans period drama, documentary and contemporary narrative work built around questions of freedom, memory and family, with four of the nine as feature debuts. May el-Toukhy‘s “Woman Unknown,” winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, anchors the group; el-Toukhy became the first Danish woman filmmaker to take that prize, while Mathilde Arcel won the Volpi Cup for best actress in the same film. Also included are Marine Atlan’s debut “La Gradiva,” Pegah Ahangarani’s “Rehearsals for a Revolution,” Sandra Wollner’s “Everytime,” winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, Margherita Ferrari’s debut “Föa – Once Upon a Future,” Isabelle Stever’s “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,” Marie Kreutzer’s “Gentle Monster,” Shahrbanoo Sadat’s “No Good Men” and Sarah Arnold’s debut “Too Many Beasts.” Judith Godrèche’s “A Girl’s Story,” part of this year’s gala presentations, joins Angela Schanelec’s “My Wife Cries,” Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak’s “Birds of War,” Jacqueline Lentzou’s “A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra,” winner of the Horizons Award for Best Director at Venice, and Konstantina Kotzamani’s “Titanic Ocean” among the additional selections.

Five directors from the program, el-Toukhy, Godrèche, Ferrari, Lentzou and Kotzamani, will travel to Busan to present their films. Godrèche will also take part in a Cine Class session, “Women, Rewriting the Screen,” and BIFF and EFP will co-host a Talk-to-Talk panel, “Women Directors: Taking the Scene,” bringing together Ferrari, el-Toukhy and Lentzou alongside Iranian director Marjan Khosravi (“Dreams of the Wild Oaks”), Chinese director Michelle Zhou (“Big Little Things”) and Afghan director Zainab Entezar (“771 Days”).

BIFF programmer Seo Seunghee said that in reviewing films for this year’s festival, she noticed European women directors becoming more prominent among the strongest titles under consideration, in both volume and quality. “Moreover, the fact that four of the nine invited films are feature debuts is also an indicator of the generational shift taking place in European cinema,” Seo said. “Our ongoing collaboration with EFP has become a reliable channel for discovering and validating outstanding films and filmmakers, and the results are fully reflected in this year’s lineup.”

EFP managing director Irina Ignatiew-Lemke said the “Europe! Voices of Women+ in Film” initiative lets EFP and its member organizations “join forces to give distinctive European voices greater international visibility.” She added, “Busan is an important platform for bringing these filmmakers and their works into dialogue with audiences and industry professionals in Asia. By combining the festival’s selection with EFP’s targeted promotion and networking, we are proud to support underrepresented voices and create opportunities for the next generation of women+ filmmakers.”

The program runs in collaboration with BIFF, the Sydney Film Festival and Festival do Rio, with support from the Creative Europe – MEDIA Programme of the European Union. This year’s participating national film promotion organizations are Austrian Films, Cinecittà, the Czech Film Center, the Danish Film Institute, German Films and Unifrance, with Cineuropa serving as media partner.

The 31st Busan International Film Festival will run Oct. 6-15 at the Busan Cinema Center and venues throughout Busan, with the 21st Asian Contents & Film Market held Oct. 10-13.

Competitive Bollywood fusion dance has thrived on American college campuses for decades, but it has rarely been the subject of a scripted feature film.

Lena Khan‘s “Best of the Best,” premiering Friday on Netflix, follows childhood best friends Maya and Anjali as they join UCLA’s competitive dance team, only to discover that the road to the U.S. Championship is far more raucous and cutthroat than they imagined.

Written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, who each competed in similar circuits growing up, the script drew Khan in even though she was not initially sure she would take on the project. Early on, she recalls mentioning it to a childhood friend, who was dismissive. “Bollywood competitions, really?” the friend said, and made it seem like it was not that cool, according to Khan, who says the reaction reflects something broader. “I think South Asians, especially in the diaspora, are so used to not even having our own self-respect.”

That realization shaped how she approached the film’s tone. “We have so much respect for the skill sets of other cultures. We’re looking at kung fu, we’re looking at these different arts. But when we look at our own, we’re used to seeing ourselves as Apu or as the funny nerdy side characters,” Khan says. She wanted the movie to carry a different posture entirely. “We can be proud of things that we do as South Asians,” she says.

Minhaj and Venkataramanujam drew on their own backgrounds for the script. Minhaj’s wife danced competitively, and Venkataramanujam performed with an a cappella team called Chai Town, giving him firsthand knowledge of how consuming the competition circuit can become. Khan spent time with UCLA’s own dance team and traveled to North Carolina to observe competitions in preparation.

Khan’s earlier work directing episodes of Netflix’s “Never Have I Ever” fed into how she thinks about representation. “When you have more than one of a minority character, then there’s suddenly become real characters,” she says, describing the shift that happens once side characters are allowed the same depth as anyone else. “You get to focus on the humanity between them, the things that become relatable to everybody else.”

Casting required actors who could carry both comedy and depth, and several, including Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, had never danced competitively before landing their roles. Khan recalls pushing Ramakrishnan toward a specific physical transformation during casting. “I need you to give me some Channing Tatum energy. And then I was like, no, actually, I need you to do a Christian Bale on me. I need a complete athletic transformation,” she says. Ramakrishnan went on to complete months of intensive dance training ahead of the shoot.

Khan built the dance sequences with choreographers Phillip Chbeeb and Makenzie Dustman, with Joya Kazi credited as co-choreographer. Each number was approached with a single guiding question, she says: “What is the essence we are trying to bring out in this particular moment?” Where a typical Bollywood dance sequence gets five days to shoot, the production often had just one. The choreography also draws on multiple regional styles, including Kuthu, Bharatanatyam and Pakistani-influenced dance, reflecting the mix of identities on the fictional team.

Khan, whose credits include the independent feature “The Tiger Hunter,” says the industry’s relationship to South Asian stories has shifted since that film came out in 2016, even as some structural limits remain. “We still don’t have that many romances or romantic comedies with South Asians,” she says, pointing out that South Asian men are often not given the chance to play the lead. The film flips that dynamic elsewhere in its own casting, she notes: “The nerdy minority character is actually a white guy. Like we have a token white guy.” She also credits a wave of South Asian musicians and actors, including Joy Crookes, whose song she fought to include in the soundtrack, with making the film possible. “And now we’re like, well, we’ve really made it when we make a movie that’s just good,” she says.

That philosophy extended to how much cultural context the film explains for a global Netflix audience. Khan says she resisted pressure to over-explain South Asian references, trusting shows like “Never Have I Ever” to have already proven audiences do not need everything spelled out. “At some point this country and the world is just full of people in different cultures,” she says.

Working with Minhaj and Venkataramanujam, both first-time feature writers, meant frequent creative disagreements, Khan says, but never without purpose. “There would be such a thoughtful reason that we were always fighting over why we’re doing a certain thing, but it was never for a vapid reason,” she says. “And they’re also just the most gracious people.”

Looking ahead, Khan says she is drawn to projects centered on overlooked people or subjects, alongside a personal passion project already underway. “I’m always on the hunt for that,” she says, describing a search for stories she wishes already existed and a way to make them for a wide audience.

“Best of the Best” also stars Lilly Singh, Nihar Duvvuri, Nico Greetham, Amryn Khurana, Tanishq Joshi, Saara Chaudry and Sasha Bhasin. It is streaming now on Netflix.