Ideas of Sexuality

April 18, 6.30pm


Kaun Mille Dekho Kissko
Director: NAMITA MALHOTRA
India, 2007, 16 minutes
The filmmaker will be present for the screening.


Mysore Mallige
Director: BHARATH MURTHY
India, 2007, 26 minutes


Cashback
Director: SEAN ELLIS
UK, 2004,18 minutes


Sea in the Blood
Director: RICHARD FUNG
Canada, 2000, 26 minutes


April 19, 6.30pm


Our Family
Dir: ANJALI MONTEIRO and K P JAYASANKAR
India, 2007, 56 minutes


The filmmakers will be present for the screening.


Synopses:


Kaun mille dekho kissko (the merry gay round of luv)
This is a short film made from clips of the mainstream Bollywood hit
film Kal Ho Na Ho. The film subverts the narrative of the heterosexual
triangle to tell the story of queer love and desire, and explores the
accidental slippages in popular cinema that allow for the narrative of
a gay love story between two male characters.


Mysore Mallige
Quoting Bharath Murthy – I wanted to make a documentary on amateur
pornography, and specifically about the video known as ´Mysore
Mallige´. That’s how the film has happened.


Cashback
Ben Willis is an art student who works the night shift several times a
week at the Whitechapel Sainsbury’s. He’s clear about the arrangement:
he trades his time for money – cashback, as he calls it. We meet his
co-workers, Sharon, Barry, and Matt, and their supervisor, Jenkins.
Ben’s colleagues are good at wasting time, but Ben talks to us about
how he makes his shift go faster: by imagining that time has stopped.
We see this late-night world of drudgery through Ben’s eyes, as time
does indeed stop, and he can get out his sketch book.


Sea in the Blood
A personal documentary about living with illness, tracing the
relationship of the artist to thalassemia in his sister, Nan, and AIDS
in his partner, Tim. The narrative of love and loss is set against a
background of colonialism in the Caribbean and the reverberations of
migration and political change.


Our Family
What does it mean to cross that line which sharply divides us on the
basis of gender? To free oneself of the socially constructed onus of
being male? Is there life beyond a hetero-normative family?


Set in Tamilnadu, India, ‘Our Family’ brings together excerpts from
Nirvanam, a one-person performance, by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and a
family of three generations of trans-gendered female subjects. Aasha,
Seetha and Dhana, who are bound together by ties of adoption, belong
to the community called Aravanis (aka Hijras, in some parts of India).
Aasha Bharathi, the grandmother, is the president of the Tamilnadu
Aravanigal Association, Chennai. Seetha, the daughter lives with her
male partner Selvam, in Coimbatore. Dhana, Seetha’s adopted daughter
also lives with her and shuttles between her adopted and her natal
families.


The film juxtaposes the ‘normality’ of their existence with the dark
and powerful narrative by Pritham- ‘Nirvanam’; Nirvanam (Liberation)
refers to the act of liberating oneself from the male body and
transforming oneself to a female. This narrative bears witness to the
tumultuous journey towards a reinvented selfhood, a journey fraught
with violence, exploitation, affection and courage. The pains,
pleasures and dilemmas of becoming the ‘other’ is the motif of the
film. Weaving together performance, life histories and everyday life,
it problematises the divides between ‘us’ and ‘them’.