Leeny
Independent Film Festival of Chennai in its third year of celebration continues to host the Queer Lens track for the second time to be a part of it. The films were curated by Queer Chennai Chronicles founder Moulee. Ten films were screened as part of Queer Lens — IFFC 2020 this year. Each of these film showed different aspect of queer lives from different walks of life and from around the globe.
UNNAMED (best screenplay)
Director- Gao Hong/ Chang Chun Yu
Both Gao Hong and Chang Chun Yu’s ‘Unnamed’ is a soul soothing film. In between all the struggles that teenager Zhang Ya- Ting face with her father to ‘fit in’ and Hong Jia-Hao face with his identity of being gay, their young world is able to break free and find a solace with each other. Here a name is not required for their connection. They look past their gender, sexuality and consider each other with kindness and love. Having a friend to clean up one’s mess is like having a friend for life.
What do adults fear so much? When their children have the capacity to find ways to fit into this messed up, discriminative, disregarding society and world. The directors use of the parking lot shows how this organised society cannot understand being unruly and disorganised and how being in the middle is different and unacceptable.
TIME AND AGAIN (best short film)
Director- Rachel Dax
Very rarely we come across elderly queer people’s stories of love. Women especially face displacement mostly not by choice, but due to the compulsion of the heteronormative society they live in. They can never exercise their authority to choose. Their sexuality or their orientation is never given a consideration for self- realisation by society at large.
Time and Again is about the revisiting of love. Love has no age; no boundaries and it is beyond the realms of time. When life feels to have come to an end during old age and is compressed into a single room of complete strangeness, where one is dependent on a nurse to be taken care of, everything around seems to feel meaningless.
The director has scripted the film for the audience to understand that love and marriage are two different things all together. Every love need not necessarily end in forever. Sex and love are different things as well. Most men and women succumb to social norms and are compelled to perform their duty.
Finding each other, finding love again at an age when companionship is most required is the beauty of the film. Ultimately ‘to be’ what one really is and to show what one really feels and being truthful to the self, caring less about the rejection one is going to face during one’s old age is the soul’s calling to exist as a free being.
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