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.
Age and youth
Other notable shorts presented this year were Ladli , a keenly observed documentary about social acceptance and a yearning for love; and Rohin Raveendran Nair’s The Booth which addresses the lack of private spaces in large cities. Both films received the QDrishti Film Grant, an initiative aimed at helping independent filmmakers to make their next LGBTQIA-centred films. Israeli film Our Way Back about a 50-year-old gay man’s secret relationship won the best international narrative short award, and explored the theme of ageing, a contrast to most of the films on this year’s line-up that focused on the hopes and struggles of younger members of the community, . Pratim D. Gupta’s The Departure starring Adil Hussain as an immigration officer —who develops an unusual friendship with a passenger — also brings issues of age and caste into the discussion around same-sex love to highlight the deep-seated preconceptions held against those deemed different.
Portuguese documentary filmmaker Jorge Pelicano’s Until Porn Do Us Part which focuses on an inter-generational conflict between a mother and her gay porn star son, and an allied clash of traditional values with modern technology and modes of communication received the award for the best documentary feature. Two short film packages – ‘Family Matters’ and ‘Together With My Child’ – dedicated to stories centred on familial ties and interactions explored ideas like tradition, history, memory, identity and acceptance. Li Cheng’s deeply reflective José which slowly and powerfully builds on themes of poverty and religion — while also reflecting on how ideas of family and entrapment often go hand-in-hand — took home both the screenplay and narrative feature awards. Félix Maritaud’s compelling and sensitive turn as a homeless, gay sex worker in French film Sauvage received the festival’s best performance honour.
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.
