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.
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
Cozy knits, sparkly bobbles and Santa hats were all the canine rage on Sunday, as hundreds of sausage dogs and their owners converged on central London for an annual parade and get-together. The dachshunds’ gathering in London’s Hyde Park came after a previous “Sausage Walk” planned for Halloween had to be postponed, because it had become so popular organizers needed to apply for an events licence. “It was going to be too much fun so they canceled it,” laughed Nicky Bailey, the owner of three sausage dogs: Una and her two 19-week-old puppies Ember and Finnegan, wearing matching red coats and silver
RSS