Indian Film Festival of Melbourne was incepted in 2010 and was founded by its director, Mitu Bhowmick Lange. Mitu has had an illustrious career spanning across production-filmmaking and has been the pioneering force behind the festival. In 2012 the Victorian government and Film Victoria board officially backed the festival. Since its inception, the festival has grown; pillar-to-pillar attracting some of the most celebrated Indian films over the past decade to the festival and has hosted some of the biggest Indian stars from the subcontinent. 2019 is a big year for the festival as it completes a decade and this year the festival will take place from August 8th to August 17th.
IFFM has not only grown from a small compact festival into a major annual cultural event in Melbourne but has also been honoured with some major accolades and has officially become the largest Indian festival in the southern hemisphere. The festival in its 10 years of existence has seen the who's who of Indian cinema in attendance, from Amitabh Bachchan to Priyanka Chopra, Karan Johar, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Vidya Balan, Kangana Ranaut, Rajkumar Hirani, Kabir Khan, Nikhil Advani, Rani Mukerji, Sushant Singh Rajput, Rajkummar Rao, Freida Pinto, Richa Chadha, Konkona Sen Sharma, Ali Fazal and many others.
Each year the festival celebrates a core theme and in 2019 the theme of the festival has been selected to be courage. Courage as a term has come to be true to the cinema, especially in the last few years. Be it on screen and off, Indian cinema's content has chosen to tell stories of subjects, which have been brave, tough and have given us some heroic icons. The theme is in lieu with a celebration of this element of modern day cinema, which will be celebrated at the 10th Indian Film Festival of Melbourne.