For ten years, short film packages have traditionally constituted an essential part of Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival’s programme. While some of them have been wondrous and powerful cinematic gems, the abundance of shorts also points to the continuing difficulties of acquiring money for feature-length queer films. Director Tanuja Chandra suggested as much at a panel discussion titled ‘Mainstreaming LGBTQ Narratives’ with writer Gazal Dhaliwal during Kashish 2019. Chandra’s film, A Monsoon Date, which screened to a nearly full house at Liberty Cinema stars Konkona Sen Sharma as a transwoman on her way to meet a man, as a storms rages within and without her. The casting decision inevitably sparked questions around the choice of cisgender actors to play trans roles. Other films at the festival like Lenin M. Sivam’s Roobha starring Canadian actor Amrit Sandhu as a transwoman who falls in love with a Sri Lankan man and the festival’s closing film, Ranjith Sankar’s Njan Marykutty , starring Malayalam actor Jayasurya as a transwoman who wishes to become a cop were also brought into the debate.
Factors ranging from the use of well-known names to help insert these narratives into the mainstream to the paucity of trans actors were cited as reasons for these selections.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Age and youth
Other notable shorts presented this year were
Portuguese documentary filmmaker Jorge Pelicano’s
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
People and places
Several films this year presented stories of immigrants, exploring how place as much as people aid or obstruct in the attainment of freedom. While in Long Distance , an Indian woman living in Australia is free to love who she wants even as she must keep her truth a secret from her parents in India; a visa rejection and a subsequent deportation lead to the end of a romance in How to Fold a Fitted Sheet . In many, as in Debalina Majumder’s tender and poignant If You Dare Desire , issues of class and communal affiliation align with that of sexual orientation so that persistent themes of injustice and prejudice can be viewed in all their inter-sectional complexity.
Majumder’s film is an imagined narrative around the real-life suicides of a lesbian couple in West Bengal’s Nandigram. In it, the girls who have eloped to Kolkata find shelter at the house of an elderly couple whose interfaith marriage has led, as in the case of the girls, to their expulsion from their village homes.
Besides their working-class backgrounds, for the viewer the societal refusal to accept relationships which do not fit into its permitted frames brings these two couples together.
Besides films, the many workshops and interactive sessions generated conversations around topics like the need to take queer cinema beyond the secure space accorded by festivals and whether the current surge in LGBTQIA films and digital content signals a positive change or is simply the result of the unmotivated riding of a popularity wave. As a massive rainbow flag engulfed the stage in a glittering closing ceremony, Kashish 2019 came to a close on the vein that while much has been accomplished, there is much still to look forward to.