New York Times (June 2, 2012) Mumbai Showcases Gay and Transgender Films By MAYANK SHEKHAR A frustrated petitioner arguing her own case before the judge blasts the state for its atrocities and double standards. As the audience in the courtroom erupts into a roar and loud applause, so does the audience sitting in one of the theaters at Cinemax, a popular multiplex in Andheri, Mumbai’s entertainment district. This could be any other courtroom scene from a mainstream Indian drama except that the heroine the audience is cheering for is a hijra, or eunuch, named Anu (based on the real-life transgender activist Laxmi Tripathi), demanding to know why hijras aren’t allowed ration cards, even voting rights, merely because the government can’t decide which gender they belong to. The Marathi -language film by Ramesh More,“We the Outsiders (Aamhi Ka Tisre),” is about a gay boy who gets kicked out of home by his family but finds love and protection among the hijras in Mumbai. The movie, which had its premiere at the Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, picked up a jury mention for best feature film. Courtesy of Kashish Film FestivalRamesh Laxman More’s Marathi film, “Aamhi Ka Tisre” or “We The Outsiders” bagged a ‘jury mention’ for the best narrative feature award at the Kashish Film Festival. Kashish, which means “attraction” in Urdu, bills itself as “India’s biggest international queer film festival,” with thousands of people attending to watch 120 movies from 30 countries at the Cinemax multiplex and at the Alliance Française de Bombay from May 23 to May 27. “It was sold to the public and press not as a curiosity factor, but as any other fest with a focus on regional or French packages, poster competition, celeb jury, etc.,” says Shibu Thomas, the festival’s media adviser, who, like other volunteers, takes two weeks off from his day job as a journalist with The Times of India to help with the festival. Sridhar Rangayan, Kashish’s festival director and founder, roughly estimates that this year’s total attendance at around 7,000 people, with 15 completely full screenings. “According to our survey, 37 percent of the participants were in fact non-L.G.B.T,” he says. Mr. Rangayan started Kashish in April 2010, with modest grants from two United Nations agencies and an Amsterdam film fund. Back then, he says, theaters were wary of hosting an L.G.B.T. film festival. Right-wing groups like Shiv Sena in Mumbai had attacked cinemas screening movies with lesbian content in the past. Deepa Mehta’s “Fire”, about the love affair between two Delhi housewives, for instance, had led to billboards and theaters being set on fire in 1996. “We’re the only L.G.B.T. fest to get clearance from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,” says Mr. Rangayan. “Prominent citizens pre-screen films as assurance to the Censor Board. The police cooperate.” That doesn’t mean that the content being shown at Kashish is any less provocative. Romney Jones’s music video,“Handyman,” for instance, was banned by the municipal council in her hometown of Perth, Australia, for showing a girl with a strap-on dildo. Ms. Jones was present at the Mumbai screening, which went off without a hitch. Courtesy of Kashish Film FestivalJulio Jorquera’s Spanish language film “Mi Ultimo Round” or “My Last Round” bagged the ‘best narrative feature film’ award at the Kashish Film Festival. The film festival organizers say that the diminished public outrage is the result of gays’ greater visibility in the larger community. “An invisible community has ‘visibilized’ itself in the social landscape, at college campuses, apartment blocks, on the streets, melting into the mainstream,” says Ashok Rao Kavi, pioneering gay activist who runs the nonprofit Humsafar Trust, an outreach group for the L.G.B.T. community, and is executive editor of Bombay Dost, India’s first gay magazine, both of which organize the Kashish festival. “In any case, while homophobia exists everywhere, unlike other cultures, it has no sanction in Hindu religion,” says Mr Kavi. The festival now attracts more mainstream sponsors, like the international banks Barclays and Nomura and Time Out magazine, run by the Essar group. Despite the festival’s location in the heart of Mumbai’s film industry, the big Indian movie stars are noticeably absent from the event. Mr. Rangayan admits it has been difficult to draw guests or jury members from commercial Bollywood: “They’d rather not, given they’re unsure of repercussions. Top actors like Hrithik Roshan,who made a supportive comment on a recent queer march, often face flak from their audiences when they identify themselves with gay causes.” Still, the event draws some well-known names in the film industry, like the festival’s chief patron, the veteran art-house director Shyam Benegal. Members of the jury this year included actors like Parvin Dabbas (“Monsoon Wedding”) and Renuka Shahane (“Hum Aapke Hain Koun”), and the actor Anupam Kher presented the best narrative film prize. (Mr. Kher, incidentally, is still remembered for a hilariously effeminate character called Pinku, which he played in the 1991 film “Mast Kalandar.”) Of the 32 films in competition, the majority were from the West, most of them general entertainers – dramas, comedy, thrillers – where the characters’ sexual orientation are incidental to the plot. The Indian ones were largely issue-based, one of which, Gopal Menon’s “Let the Butterflies Fly,” won the best documentary feature prize. The film is an exposé of a Bangalore police officer, a local doctor and a complicit media that forced a young adult who had voluntarily changed his gender to undergo dangerous re-grafting surgery so he could become male again. Most other Indian features on relationships were either boringly self-loathing or mediocre. The jury (of which I was a part) chose not to award any film in the only exclusively Indian category, narrative shorts. Courtesy of Kashish Film FestivalA still from Jeff Roy’s film “Rites Of Passage” which picked up a ‘jury mention’ for the best documentary feature at the Kashish Film Festival. Mr Kavi suggests this as being symptomatic of the position of the L.G.B.T. community in Indian society: “In the West, gay relationships tend to get constructed within homosexual monogamy. The situation is more complex here. There is identity politics around caste, and most importantly social and family acceptance that is considered supreme. My aunt told me she doesn’t care if I have sex with an elephant or crocodile, so long as I get married. You can be openly gay, but how do you change this perception?” The prize for best documentary short film went to a striking gem, Lok Prakash’s “Are We So Different (Aamra Ki Etoi Bhinno),” set in rural Bangladesh, where the characters, most from lower classes, speak of their dual existence of being gay in reality but heterosexual to the world. They are an illegal lot in their own country, as Section 377 of the old British colonial law criminalizing sodomy and other homosexual acts still applies to several former British colonies, including Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Myanmar and Jamaica. The code applied to India as well until July 2, 2009, when the Delhi High Court finally struck down the draconian section of the Indian penal code as being antithetical to the constitution. “That was the huge sigh of relief,” says Mr Kavi. Mr. Rangayan said: “It’s because of this that we can host such a popular L.G.B.T. film festival.” The court-room scenes aren’t over yet, however. A challenge to the High Court ruling is presently being argued in New Delhi’s Supreme Court.
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