THE BANGALORE QUEER FESTIVAL 2O16
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Those of you who have formed the pleasure-seeking repeat audience at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival these last eight years know that the festival is a mad concoction of visual delight (of all kinds!), tactile encounters, bloopers, stampedes, mosquito attacks, arguments, and is an event that welcomes the lost and wandering, the hungry and yearning, the naughty, the newbie, and the cinephile. We are therefore delighted to be holding the 8th BQFF with our partners and collaborators, the Alliance Francaise de Bangalore and the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, this year. BQFF 2015 featured over 55 films from 22 countries, including France, Belgium, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, Iran, Slovenia, Russia, India, Germany, Finland, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, USA, UK, Portugal, Spain, Myanmar, Fiji, Taiwan and China.
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BQFF 2016 included 50 films that came to us from 25 countries across the world. We worked more towards showing films from independent Indian filmmakers and in languages from the sub-continent, and we’re proud that they went on to become a big part of last year’s programming and have grown in number this year. The lineup included a large number of Indian shorts and features – Viju Varma’s Odum Raja Aadum Rani, Rohan Kanawade’s Sundar, Hyash Tanmoy’s Stark Electric Jesus and Mrigansekhar Ganaguly and Hyash Tanmoy’s An Obsolete Altar, Shailaja Padindala’s Memories of a Machine and Namita Aavriti and Gee Imaan Semmalar’s Transformers, and many more films.
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BQFF 2016 also included some stunning feature length films from other countries, such as Tangerine (from BIFFES), Bande de Filles, La Belle Saison, and Laurence Anyways (organised by the AFB). In addition, we screened a set of short films from Filmfest Dresden and the Berlinale Queer Selection, sent to us by the DIALOGUES festival, hosted by the GI/MMB, Kolkata.
One of the highlights of the 2016 festival was a very special programme specially curated for the Bangalore audience by Thomas Waugh, Canadian critic, curator, lecturer, author, actor and activist. This included two sets of films: Sex in the Eighties and LOSS.
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Our annual exhibition and performance section came alive with the works of Vietnamese photographer Maika Elan (The Pink Choice), illustrations by Pakistani artist Ayqa Khan, a selection of BDSM-themed photographs from The Kinky Project, and a series from Akshay Mahajan’s The Real Begums of Bhopal. Artist Suresh Kumar curated a relay of performances along with 11 other Bangalore-based artists around the theme of Body + Vulnerability. Author and activist A. Revathi, writer and activist Chandini Gagana, and poet and writer Ashley Tellis all read from their boundary-breaking badass writing. Dancers Masoom Parmar, the Classy Kaĵzz, The Pink Divas and Alex (the Sexy Lexi Show) closed the performances to thundering applause.
If you’ve never been on the maÄ´resses before, get ready to sprawl this year! Hope you’ll see andenjoy everything – and most importantly, have the most amazing three days at BQFF! What you wearing?