The 5th EthnoKino Film Festival 2025
Key takeaways
The Swiss Leading House South Asia supports transdisciplinary cooperation and cultural exchange between Switzerland and South Asia. Through mobility and exchange funding, it enabled collaborations with filmmakers and researchers from India and other countries represented at EthnoKino 2025. The network facilitated connections with Swiss universities, NGOs, the media sector and general publics, fostering research innovation at the intersection of visual arts, anthropology, and sustainability. This bilateral support was crucial for transforming the festival into a bridge between research and public engagement.
The Swiss Leading House South Asia supports transdisciplinary cooperation and cultural exchange between Switzerland and South Asia. Through mobility and exchange funding, it enabled collaborations with filmmakers and researchers from India and other countries represented at EthnoKino 2025. The network facilitated connections with Swiss universities, NGOs, the media sector and general publics, fostering research innovation at the intersection of visual arts, anthropology, and sustainability. This bilateral support was crucial for transforming the festival into a bridge between research and public engagement.
The 5th EthnoKino Film Festival 2025 (Bern, Meiringen, Cappadoia, Cluj Napoca, Berlin and Mexico City) responded to a growing need for inclusive and epistemologically diverse spaces that bridge scientific, artistic, and indigenous perspectives on sustainability and cultural heritage. Global discourse particularly around climate change, biodiversity and social justice often neglects local voices and non-Western epistemologies. In contrast, EthnoKino seeks to restore balance through such representatives, using a multimodal lens to curatorship that brings films, talks, workshops and excursions together by also using film as a tool for research, pedagogy, intercultural dialogue and social cohesion. The 2025 edition, themed MAGIC, explored the relational wisdom embedded in landscapes, rituals, and memory across the world’s mountain regions. Supported by Swiss academic and cultural institutions, the festival served as a platform for knowledge exchange between researchers, filmmakers, and indigenous communities from Peru, Brazil, Morocco, Iran, Patagonia, Turkey, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Romania, Mexico, Switzerland, Pakistan, Norway, and India. It reflected Switzerland’s role as a hub for transdisciplinary research communication, linking art and science in pursuit of sustainable and fairer futures.
Dr. Eda Elif Tibet, a postdoctoral researcher at the Wyss Academy for Nature and affiliate researcher at the Critical Sustainability Unit of the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern, is the founder of EthnoKino. She guided the film festival as researcher, teacher and curator, blending ethnographic research with cinematic storytelling. Her work centers on how film can act as a method of inquiry into human-environmental relationships and indigenous cosmologies.
Partnering researcher Prof. Aashish Xaxa supported the festival by delivering a vision talk on the future of indigenous cinema, running the workshops, and in the curating of the indigenous films from India. He will be leading the India edition in 2026, with the new theme “Love”.
Through the festival, Dr. Tibet facilitated workshops, masterclasses, and “Vision Talks” where filmmakers and scholars reflected on pluriversality, epistemologies, decolonial storytelling, eco-spirituality, and interdependence.
The immersive setting of Meiringen, surrounded by the Swiss Alps, became an extension of the research itself, a site of encounter between academic reflection and lived experience. Dr. Tibet describes the festival as a “living laboratory”, where audiences do not merely consume knowledge but co-create it through dialogue, emotion, and sensory participation.
Now the next chapter is to co-produce films in India and meet the Indian scientific and artistic world through an India edition of our film festival.
EthnoKino 2025 demonstrated how cinema can become a vehicle for introducing the pluriverse through intercultural collaboration. By curating over twenty films from five continents, the festival cultivated shared reflection on how humans inhabit, interpret, and care for their environments. Indigenous and local filmmakers from India, Kenya, Peru, and the Arctic were brought into dialogue with Swiss scholars and students, generating new insights into plural cosmologies and sustainable living.
The festival’s workshops on Recognising the Pluriverse and the Future of Indigenous Peoples Cinema inspired new academic partnerships, including follow-up projects on introducing workshops and retreats across India and Switzerland.
The screenings in Meiringen’s historic mountain cinema deepened public appreciation for science-society interfaces, demonstrating that research impact can occur not only in journals but through lived cultural experience.
As a model of bilateral and transdisciplinary cooperation, EthnoKino 2025 strengthened Switzerland’s visibility as a leader in bridging arts and sciences. It translated complex research questions into tangible, emotional narratives that engage communities beyond academia from alpine villagers to international scholars fostering empathy, curiosity, and long-term partnerships.
See the 5th film festival official page:
See Blog Posts:
5th EthnoKino Bern & Meiringen: Magic in the Mountains
EthnoKino Cappadocia Gallery for Talks, Masterclasses & Performances
EthnoKino Cluj-Napoca: Celebrating Cinema, Culture, and Community
5th EthnoKino “Magic” Cappadocia
🎬 EthnoKino Online Shorts Showcase
Testimonials
“Working within the framework of the Swiss bilateral cooperation programs allowed us to expand EthnoKino beyond borders intellectually and geographically. Through our collaborations with researchers and filmmakers from India, Brazil, Turkey, Switzerland, Australia and from across the world, we discovered that knowledge is not only produced in universities but also sung, filmed, and remembered in landscapes. The Leading House’s support gave our vision a home in Switzerland while keeping the doors open to the world. It reminded us that storytelling is cultural diplomacy and that every encounter, whether in a classroom or a mountain cinema, can be a form of research on the pluriverse and a co-creation of many knowledges in itself.”
– Dr. Eda Elif Tibet, founder EthnoKino Film Festival
“The 5th EthnoKino Film Festival, ‘Magic’, held in Bern and Meiringen in Switzerland, showcased incredible films of Indigenous Peoples from Asia, South America, Northern Europe, and beyond the world. Moving away from the traditional anthropological notion of Indigenous Peoples, these films breathed new life into dynamic societies engaging with change, with a focus on the people having their agencies in these changes. As a collaborator, I had the immense pleasure bringing independent Indigenous Peoples films from India and Nepal to Switzerland. What moved me was the incredible audience reaction in Switzerland, and the eagerness to learn more about these films and the people. I would like to thank the Swiss Leading House South Asia for their generous support to our project. This has enhanced our engagement with a pluriversal vision of the moving arts and deepens Indigenous Peoples epistemologies.”
– Dr. Aashish Xaxa, social anthropologist and co-curator EthnoKino Film Festival, Bern and Meiringen 2025.
