Delhi goes pink

It���s time again for the queer community to have some fun and masti.
Come October 23, and the The Nigah Queer fest in Delhi will enter its third year. The 10-day festival, which will go on till November 1, will include films, visual art, book launches and interactive sessions, and will conclude with a picnic at Nehru Park. The festival is entirely funded by individual donations from queer and queer-friendly people and aims to create a queer-positive mental space in society.
���People want to see movies that are actually part of mainstream cinema, and the good news is that the Indian mainstream is also coming up with queer issues-based movies,��� says gay activist Gautam Bhan, who���s one of the organisers of the Nigah Queer fest. He adds, ���Over the years, the response has been very positive. I���d say that this fest is the festival of the city, as the whole city waits for it.���
There have been around 45-50 filmmakers, both from India and abroad, who have entered their films for the festival, but only around 25-30 movies will be showcased. One of those movies is Katha, by Debalina Majumdar, a nine-minute film on a gay man and his father, two lesbian women, and the plight of a transgender in everyday life. The other entries are I Want To Live by Sunil Gupta, Are We Talking Straight, which has been shot majorly in Kolkata, Rainbow ��� The Pride March, which is about Chennai���s first queer pride march, and Busted, a film by Malaysian filmmaker Poh Si Teng, which is about being a transgender in Kuala Lumpur, where it���s a crime.
���This festival is something we always wait for every year ��� it���s a platform to bond within the community and express queer art. It helps in a lot of cross-cultural interaction,��� says Monish Kabir Malhotra, also part of the organisational team for the fest. The festival will also have a visual arts exhibition curated by Sunil Gupta and Bhan. ���The theme of the exhibition this time is ���fantasy���. It will be about fantasies captured by the lens. The exhibition will also have live photo workshops where people can come and get themselves clicked,��� says Monish. For the interactive sessions, there will be Baroda-based art historian and gay activist Shivaji K Panikkar, German gay activist and artist Ins A Kromminga and Gupta, who will hold a panel discussion about queer art and readings of queer art in the country. Lurkings, a book by Nishit Saran, will be released at the festival.
Talking about security concerns, Bhan says, ���After section 377 was decriminalised, there are no worries for us. Some good venues like the Max Mueller Bhavan and the Indian Social Institute have come forward to help us by giving us space for the film festival and the exhibition.���
ayandrali.dutta@timesgroup.com