In a country that criminalises same-sex relationships and where the public isn’t sensitised enough to deal with it, to successfully run a film festival year after year around the LGBTQ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) is no mean achievement. Sridhar Rangayan, the director of KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, has been doing just that without fail for the past eight years. In its ninth edition, Rangayan not just introduces some critically acclaimed films about gay pride, but also his own film Evening Shadows as the closing film.
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The French film Beats Per Minute, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival in 2017, will be opening the KASHISH festival on May 23 at Liberty Carnival Cinema. Directed by Robin Campillo and starring Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Arnaud Valois, Adèle Haenel, Antoine Reinartz, the film is set in early 1990s in Paris. It is about a group of activists who fight for HIV/AIDS stricken people. It’s about a movement that took on the sluggish government agencies and major pharmaceutical companies in bold, invasive actions. It features the organisation, ACT UP and its members—many of them gay and HIV-positive—who embrace their mission with a literal life-or-death urgency. ACT UP-Paris was created on June 26, 1989, ahead of a gay pride parade.
The film has also won six César Awards including the Best Film, and the Best Film at International Film Festival of India at Goa in 2017, besides being a massive hit at the French box office, selling 8,00,000 tickets. Campillo, himself a gay man and part of the ACT UP movement in the early days, has said that the greatest satisfaction in making the film was that people are talking about ACT UP and AIDS again.
According to Rangayan, the opening and closing films reflect the theme of the KASHISH festival this year—Together, With Pride. “While the opening film highlights the coming together of individuals to fight a common cause—the AIDS epidemic, Evening Shadows highlights how it is important for family members to come together to support their children. Both films resonate the thought that only with pride, can we all have our dignity,” he said.
Mona Ambegaonkar and Devansh Doshi in a still from Evening Shadows
Evening Shadows premiered in February 2018 at Sydney Mardigras Film Festival and has since screened in Bengaluru, Los Angeles, and won 'Free To Be Me' award at Roze Filmdagen, Amsterdam. It will be screened at six more festivals around the world. The film is about a gay son coming out to his mother in a small town in India. “This is homecoming for our film after its screenings across the world. We are hoping that the audiences in Mumbai will love the film and embrace its heart-warming story. We also hope it will awaken many more minds to greater acceptance and give out a string message about ‘together with pride’,” said Rangayan.
The KASHISH festival will be held between May 23 and 27 at the Liberty Carnival Cinemas and Metro Inox, with 140 films from 45 countries being screened, 33 of which are Indian.