Dunno Y ... Na Jaane Kyun, a film featuring India’s first cinematic gay kiss, is scheduled to go on general release within weeks.
Already dubbed India’s answer to Brokeback Mountain, it tells the story of an aspiring model who travels to Mumbai, India’s commercial and film capital, to seek his fortune and enters into a homosexual relationship, in part to further his career.
Trailers of the film have been well received by activists.
“It looks good,” said Ashok Row Kavi, editor of Bombay Dost, India’s first gay magazine. “It talks of the complexities [of being gay] in India. Taboos are still very strong and hopefully it will change things.”
For decades, Bollywood avoided graphic depictions of even heterosexual kisses, with films famously cutting away to images of budding flowers, breaking waves or crashing waterfalls at the crucial moment.
Earlier this year a film called Love Sex aur Dhokha, which included relatively graphic scenes of heterosexual sex, was released. Though there was much media debate, the film generated little public outrage, encouraging those seeking to draw the largely formulaic Indian film industry in new directions. However the most explicit sequences in the film were cut or altered by censors.
“The sexual revolution has been under way in Bollywood for half a decade,” film critic and author Anupama Chopra said. “Kissing is now fairly acceptable for most of the younger stars. The younger directors are responding to an evolving audience.”
However, homosexuality remains taboo. The nearest Bollywood has got to portraying same-sex relationships so far is the 2008 film Dostana, which showed two straight men pretending to be gay to persuade a landlady to allow her beautiful daughter to be their housemate. At the end of the film, as a punishment, they kiss.
“It was a comedy, but did involve big names playing effeminate men on screen,” Chopra said.
Last week, a gay film festival in Mumbai attracted big crowds.
“From India alone there are 25 films. I thought not many queer films were made in India,” the festival director, Sridhar Rangayan, told DNA newspaper.
The committee was careful about their selection, however.
“We don’t want to hurt the Indian sensibility. We had to discard 30 films for various reasons,” Rangayan said.
Gay activists fear Dunno Y will provoke a backlash from religious and political conservatives, many of whom opposed the recent effective repeal of colonial-era Indian laws that made homosexuality punishable by up to 10 years in prison as a crime “against nature.”
Promotional posters for Dunno Y ... Na Jaane Kyun showing two semi-naked young men embracing did spark controversy last year.
The film’s director, Sanjay Sharma, told the BBC recently that Indian cinemagoers were “mature enough” to deal with the storyline.
“At the moment I’m not thinking about any political or censor problems,” Sharma said.
Sharma’s brother Kapil, who plays the lead, said Indian audiences were ready to accept homosexuality on screen. Change, however, is slow.
“We are still a very long way from seeing a mainstream major star play a gay role and that, we won’t see that soon,” Chopra said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS