Engayging Life

Last month I was in Mumbai, for a day, during which I had the opportunity to be at the venue of the third Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, called ‘Kashish’ at the Infinity Mall at Andheri (W). This is a very new endeavour, and a timely one, thanks to filmmaker Shridhar Rangayan (who recently did a series called ‘Project Bolo’, which I believe is an import work in the field of LGBTIQ study/awareness in India. You can find it in Google).

Considering it was a queer event, there was a decent amount of people, and I am told that the crowd is growing with every passing year. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to catch any of the films (I had already seen most of the feature films in the line up; there were a number of short films I had no clues about...)

Anyway, there, I picked up a DVD comtaining a number of short films, I don’t know if they are available online; should be, but I had never heard of them. The films were short at the 2010 edition of the film festival.

Among them there was a short film called ‘Engayging Life’, interviews with four gay-identified man from varied background. (One of the interviewee also maintains a blog, which is also called ‘Engayging Life’: http://engayginglife.blogspot.in/).

There’s this guy, who wanted to be a hotelier, but couldn’t after he tested to be HIV positive. In the end, he gives a overall scenario of his life … and if it’s not heart-breaking and brave and poweful, I don’t know what is...

The following are the screen shots... (Click on one picture to view them on slideshow.)