Film festivals, friendships and dressing up

Illustration/Uday Mohite

There's only one thing nicer than going to a film festival where you have a film showing. And that's going to a film festival where you don't have a film showing. Last week, I got to do both.

A film we made as part of our work at Agents of Ishq, was in competition at the Mumbai International Film Festival of Documentary, Shorts and Animation. I have been attending the festival from the time it started in 1990, when it was BIFF and I was a student; and through later years, when Mumbai became Bombay, the festival became MIFF and I became a filmmaker. Being government run, the festival has its chequered political history. It can also feel impersonal. Yet, as you attended over time, whether audience or filmmaker, a certain intimacy develops. You got to know regular audiences. You spent days watching films with old friends and new, chatting over lunch and coffee and drinks, showing visiting filmmakers your city. You come to love someone's work, learn from and look forward to it - and they to yours. As a young filmmaker you may find that an older filmmaker you admire has seen and loved your film, and pleasure makes confidence bloom. Friendships grow through time spent together. Connections form, of encouragement. Some end up working together, or loving together. Over the years, that's how you become part of a wider community, by taking an interest in each other, and the worlds we each carry with us. Professional identities may help start a community, but they aren't enough to sustain it. Friendship makes community and belonging more possible.

When you have a film in the festival it's exciting and also anxious - did the person who said it was "interesting" hate it? Will it win a prize? When you haven't made a film and are just attending the festival, it's glorious. It's like being an aunt - all the fun without the sleepless nights and Doraemon on repeat.

That's how attending the Kashish Queer Film Festival, now in its 13th year, felt. I called my friend and said "I may be overdressed but I want to be." She said, "you can't be overdressed. It's Kashish." Indeed, part of the joy of Kashish is getting dressed up and luxuriating in the too-saucy-to-resist compliments of older gay men, taking selfies and laughing very hard at some politically in-correct humour. I met young filmmakers, who were there with their first films, ate too many snacks, gossiped with older friends and marked off the movies I wanted to watch in the programme. I left awash with well-being.

Communities are not only about identity, though they are partly that. Pleasure is an important thing that brings people together. The pleasure we take in each other and in celebrating each other's paths, also creates community and a feeling of belonging.

Kashish has served the twin purpose of providing a space for young queer people to congregate and find community, as well as be a space for independent filmmakers. Sometimes these identities overlap. Independent festivals, more than fancy, institutional ones, are often born from the desire for a more expansive and unconventional world, and so, they help create a new sense of intimacy, belonging and comradeship. At the (hopefully) end of a pandemic, it's what the doctor ordered.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com