A ‘different’ film festival in Hyderabad

It was a normal Sunday. The road to Annapurna Studios, quite empty. And if it wasn’t for the Rainbow flag that was put up inside, you wouldn’t even know that the Queer Campus Hyderabad was celebrating its one year of existence by hosting a Queer Film Festival, a day dedicated to 20-odd films.

While the festival went on well, not everything was easy for the organisers. Abhi Tam, one of the organisers says, “Three days before the event, the studio developed cold feet. They had faced vandalism during an earlier queer film festival and were scared about a recurrence.” He adds, “We assured them that no such thing would take place and we also didn’t publicise the event much.”

The group also had to deal with lack of sponsors. Sai Tejo, another organiser says, “Ever since Section 377 was criminalised, companies stay away from us.” The film festival was also shortened to one day. Sai adds, “We ran the risk of being just a one-day hit as we didn’t want to be give people a chance to create problems.” Among the films that were quite a hit, city boy Avinash M’s films, Kuch Palon Mein and Kyunki were two of them. Chennai-based filmmaker Lokesh, showcased the trailer of his crowd-funded project My Son is Gay.

So far, 25 per cent of the film has been shot. The organisation is planning to come up with a sensitisation programme and for that they will get in touch with colleges and “try to make people aware of the entire issue”.