20th Tasveer Film festival
Festival Dates: Oct 7th-12th, 2025
Submission Starts on: March 1st. For details go to our Filmfreeway page.
The Tasveer Film Festival is the leading South Asian film festival in North America, headquartered in the scenic Pacific Northwest city of Seattle, Washington State. We are also the first and only Academy® qualifying South Asian Film Festival in the world.
The Tasveer Film Festival, held annually in October, showcases cinema from across South Asia, featuring works from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet, as well as films by South Asian diaspora filmmakers worldwide.
The festival offers a platform for South Asian storytellers worldwide to showcase their talent through films, Q&As, workshops, and panel discussions. We firmly believe that cinema has the power to spark ideas and unite communities, and through storytelling, we can create deeper understanding leading to a happier, healthier, and more informed world.
Tasveer takes pride in discovering and showcasing visionary filmmakers early in their careers, including Academy® Award nominee Shaunak Sen, and acclaimed directors Mariam Ghani and Roya Sadat, among others, who later gained international recognition.
The festival has also established itself as a vital platform for distinctive voices like Tibetan filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, and documentary pioneer Anand Patwardhan, whose powerful works often face limited theatrical distribution due to political sensitivities. Through this commitment, we continue to amplify important narratives that might otherwise go unheard.
Here’s a brief history of the Tasveer Film Festival over the years:

2004: First Tasveer Film Festival, then called as the Independent South Asian Film Festival, was organized at Broadway Performance Hall

2011: The earliest prototype of the Tasveer mascot, the girl with a megaphone is found in this year festival’s poster. Check out our TSAFF Archive to see the 2011 poster.

2013: The Tasveer logo becomes official and visible on the 8th Seattle South Asian Film Festival. Check out the TSAFF 2013 poster.

2020: Tasveer collaborates with other South Asian film festivals from the US and Canada to launch a unified virtual film festival, Coalition of South Asian Film Festivals, COSAFF. This was one way of reaching out to our audience during the Pandemic.

2023: Tasveer attains Oscar-qualifying film festival status.