Tasveer Film Festival & Market: Oct 8th-12th, 2025
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 Oscar® qualifying South Asian Film Festival in the world.
Held annually during the first two weeks of October, the Tasveer Film Festival showcases bold and dynamic cinema from across the world—celebrating diverse voices and South Asian perspectives worldwide. South Asia encompasses Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet, and its diaspora worldwide.
The festival offers a platform for South Asian storytellers from across the globe 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 uplifting 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:
TFF Posters
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.