Being a queer-trans filmmaker, living on the cusp of aspiration painted by big Bollywood and the despair of living a very unsparkling queer life, my work attempts to paint queerness outside of the heteronormative gaze. Cinema is a precarious medium, existing in the few minutes of a blissful dream and a grim waking. I am trying to find out then, what would it mean to make queer films, but also to make films queerly. Where queerness is not the event, but the interruption of queerness is.
Don’t Interrupt While We Dance is a film in three scenes. It captures the everyday life of six queer and trans flatmates living in Delhi. Meandering through passionate romances, snackable dreams and leaking water taps, it has no revelations to give, only mundanity cloaked around the queerness of life itself. As these friends celebrate a birthday, their joy is interrupted, by the police – unempathetic onlookers and enforcers of respectability. The grim realizations of dehumanization, violence and scrutiny of queer and trans people drips down police station walls.
For the sake of not giving it away, I shall not tell you more, but I will let you know, this film shall not hold place for pity. For meekness. For victimization. Through the end, the protagonists fight. And then they dance.
For queer and trans people, the idea of rest has often seemed like a luxury. They are often viewed with a gaze of pity and sorrow, and this leaves no space for joy – for people to be as they are and simply enjoy a laugh or two. Don’t Interrupt While We Dance is about the reclamation of this joy which has been denied to queer and trans people on and off the screen. This joy which is not always bite-sized, which is seldom offered, which time and again is snatched away. A short film, this is my most aspirational project to date, and I am crowdfunding for it.
Revisionist history as a form has always fascinated me. All of it. But in Indian cinema perhaps, a larger need for the revisionist present exists. Our presents are vivid, they are dotted with the grim, the colourful, the scared, and the daunting. How is it then queer cinema dots around the narrow nucleus of acceptance – from parents, neighbours, and co-workers when there are other worlds to orbit. Are queer people not afraid? Are they not angry? Are they not dancing? Why is it that the formulas of these films always centre queer characters without centering their agency to challenge the repressive social systems.
Of course, fiction does not come without aspiration, and if we can aspire for homophobes to have a change of heart, we must also aspire for some of us to retaliate. Where do the queer people who fight back go? They cannot be boxed in dusty memoirs of the past, only to be picked up during Pride Month for listicles. They continue to live, to be gutsy, to bite the ankle of the system, often in unlawful ways.
There are several ‘mainstream’ queer films now, but I don’t think the Hum Saath Saath Hain-fication of queer cinema benefits any of us. I am attempting to make a film where happiness is not store bought, but kneaded by hand.
It is imperative that there be stories where queer and trans individuals are seen as vivid and multifaceted individuals who deserve mundanity and whose anger is reasonable. While sure, love is love etc., there is much more to queer and trans lives than that. Anger as an emotion has been denied to all of us – to be angry at our abusive families, our fatigued workplaces, our bloodthirsty government. And to be angry is to be human. Of course, the queer and trans experience is not singular, and neither is our anger, so I can only attempt to paint a sliver of the bigger picture.
The crux of this film is something I lived through my flat in Delhi one fine night. Thus, while it is aspirational, it is also very personal. I am not interested in the market economy of making films. I am not interested in telling you how it will be alright in the end, because I don’t know really. Joy is interrupted, yes. Dancing is interrupted, yes. Lives are interrupted, yes. I do want to make a film where my actors get paid. The people holding up the lights get paid. The people behind the camera get paid. Indie cinema is radical, but the radicality is generated by underpaid labour and I know so many of us who can simply not sustain it. Yet, that does not mean the radicality of our films should disappear.
It has been a task getting producers for the film. It is about anger and thus not profitable. The people within the film, the queer and trans people within the film are angry, but not in a petition way, and not in a ‘let’s put an Instagram post about it’ way. Anger is often not afforded in only respectable forms. Governments are allowed to be angry with their guns and khaki, people are not. In such a case a communal way of making films has to emerge, which presents queer and trans people and their emotions without apology. It will be nice to see what we can do, uncensored and unrestricted.
Click here to hear the author speak about their filmmaking venture and to contribute to their crowdfunding campaign – Editor.
About the main photo: Poster for the film Don’t Interrupt While We Dance – design by Sharannya Eledath Mukherji and illustration by Yathaarth Yadav
