One Year of Cinema de l'Étrange: Wench Film Festival's Dark Little Ritual in the City of Dreams

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For the past year, something quietly defiant has been unfolding at Alliance Française in Churchgate.

Wench Film Festival’s Cinema de l'Étrange is not just a screening series — it’s an ongoing ritual. A curated descent into cinema that doesn’t behave. Strange, poetic, feral, unclassifiable.

Every month, Wench has summoned films that slip between the cracks — French body horror, Indian surrealism, feminist ghost stories, queer monster flicks. Films that don’t wait to be understood. Films that often don’t get shown elsewhere.

Some nights have been packed. Others intimate. But always electric. The kind of space where a post-screening conversation turns unexpectedly personal, where the strange becomes familiar.

Because cinema, the kind Wench champions, isn’t just about spectacle. It’s about confronting the underbelly — the grotesque, the invisible, the buried.

"Cinema de l'Étrange now marks one year of holding space for genre cinema in all its raw, political, magical form. It’s not about building an audience. It’s about building an altar.

To those who’ve attended: thank you for joining the séance. And for those who haven’t — the veil lifts again next month."

-Sapna Moti Bhavnani, Chief Wench