India’s Oldest Queer Film Festival DIALOGUES Returns: A Sneak Peek

Sappho for Equality, Pratyay Gender Collective, and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan collectively organise DIALOGUES, the oldest queer film festival every year. It is the oldest queer film festival in India, running since 2007. This is a non-ticketed, non-commercial festival aimed at raising awareness of queer and trans-lived experiences.

Over two days, the festival will screen 14 films from countries like Germany, Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, amongst others. It will present different genres such as short films, documentaries, feature films, romance, and docu-features. Free passes for entry access for everyone have been arranged.

DIALOGUES was launched in 2007 as an annual cultural event in Calcutta that left a void when it came to queer films, and more importantly, a conversation around it. The festival focuses on showcasing feature films, shorts, and videos from national and international filmmakers on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities, providing a much-needed platform for independent film and video from India and abroad.

From organising the last print screening on 16mm projection at the Fassbinder retrospective to hosting retrospectives on Derek Jarman and Agnes Varda, DIALOGUES has covered a chequered path. Though the primary identity of DIALOGUES is that of a queer film festival, it is consistently seeking to include socially relevant themes across the spectrum. The festival is a celebration of writers, directors, and actors and their work dealing with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex themes and issues-but does not limit itself to narrow definitions of these identities. DIALOGUES believes that the Film Festival is yet another tool in the larger struggle.

Let us take a peek at two of the films on the schedule, Wakhri and Jodi.

Wakhri, from Pakistan, directed by Iram Parveen Bilal is an Urdu language film. It talks about Noor, a young widow who leads a double life. During the day, she is a committed teacher in a primary school. At night, she is an important member of Lahore’s queer nightclub scene. On the one hand, she is worried about the reduction in the number of girls admitted to the school, while on the other, she dreams of establishing a full-fledged women’s school that runs against established social norms. She combines within her a life she loves to lead in secret and the mission to open a school with her own funding. How is this possible? Though her best friend Gucchi pushes her in her endeavours, social media spills over, and she finds her world collapsing around her.

Jodi, meaning “If” in Bengali and directed by Tathagata Ghosh, has just returned from a big tour of big film festivals armed with awards. “If” is a 26-minute short film that presents a short, subtle, but very powerful film on love between two young women still looked down upon by the urban middle class to which these two young women, Jaya and Fatima, belong. Jaya is a typically middle-class young girl who is secretly in love with Fatima, a Muslim young girl who lives a free life, smoking, and drinking, and is liberated and not constrained by old values like Jaya. Jaya and Fatima, two women in love, are separated because of Jaya's marriage arranged by her conservative father. Finally, they seek their own solution to the problem.

Says Ghosh about the film, “For me, the film is about relationships more than anything else. I simply wanted to create a feeling of love and loss within the audience. I have grown up watching films by Rituparno Ghosh, and this film is in that direction, I can say. Films like "Unishe April," "Raincoat," "Abohoman," "Memories in March," and even Aparna Sen's "Paromitar Ekdin" were my inspirations. I wanted to build that world I have seen around me, a middle-class Bengali household, and the characters in them. I wanted the film to feel like a Bengali short story, like the ones I have grown up reading. The writings of Pratibha Basu, Moti Nandy, and Sunil Ganguly among others have had a huge impact on me. This film is for the souls who have loved and lost and gone through that feeling of helplessness when our loved ones move away from us. So that was my motivation and inspiration, I can say.”

The directors might not be gay themselves but are empathetic with the issues faced by these groups just because they think, feel, and experience life differently. Let us wish them all the happiness they deserve. Films portraying gay and lesbian relationships in Indian cinema are of two kinds. One represents the truly Indian films, while the other comes from diaspora filmmakers from South Asia. Interestingly, the message they carry is similar.

(The author is a senior film critic based in Kolkata. Views personal.)