Mumbai: With the start of rainbow month, the 17th edition of KASHISH Pride Film Festival kicked off on June 3 and will be on till June 7. The festival is one of Asia’s most prominent LGBTQ+ film screening events that brings queer films and documentaries from across the world into the spotlight. This year, KASHISH is showcasing 153 queer films from 43 countries, as well as several panel discussions and masterclasses across three venues in south Mumbai: Liberty Cinema, Alliance Francaise and, for the first time, the National Gallery of Modern Art.Founder and festival director Sridhar Rangayan says, “KASHISH’s foremost mission is to bring queer visibility and representation into mainstream cinema.” This year, the festival attracted considerable attention from a range of artists from the mainstream film industry. One of the most well-known artists who attended the inauguration was actor Konkona Sen Sharma, who was also felicitated with the Rainbow Voices Award for her queer roles in mainstream films and on OTT platforms.Even though this year the film festival focuses on stories mostly revolving around Spain, with four feature films and 13 short films from the country, the number of regional films showcased has significantly improved since the previous year. Shekhar Sawant, a senior citizen who has been attending the festival since its inception 17 years ago, says he is moved by the attention and love that KASHISH has garnered and is pleased that now, more than ever before, regional documentaries and films are being pushed to the front. He says the festival has helped publicise such films. “If it had not been screened at the festival, I would not have seen the films at all,” he said.Umang Sheth, the founder of The Hugging Club of India, a queer mental health support group, appreciates that queer films dealing with mental health are also screened at KASHISH, as it acts as a community-driven therapeutic outlet of expression.Kiran Bhat, a novelist and poet, who has been attending the film festival since 2018, said, “We live in a time where to be queer and choosing to dissent is difficult, and it is important to have spaces where we as people, who live in different ways, can still coexist. I hope spaces like KASHISH continue to exist.”
