‘Naanu Ladies,’ ‘LA QueenCianera’ Win at India’s Kashish LGBTQ+ Film Festival
variety.comNaman Ramachandran Shailaja Padindala’s Kannada-language film “Naanu Ladies” won best narrative feature and Pedro Peira’s English and Spanish-language film “LA QueenCianera” best documentary feature at the 2022 Kashish LGBTQ+ film festival in Mumbai.Gujarati-language shorts “Muhafiz” by Pradipta Ray and “Dal Bhat” by Nemil Shah” won best Indian narrative short and the Riyad Wadia Award for best emerging Indian filmmaker respectively. “Muhafiz” also won best screenplay for Ray and Ashutosh Pathak.Padindala said: “ ‘Naanu Ladies’ is a film attempting to identify cis-het culture [as it] weaves itself into the queerness of everyday life.
The film attempts to re-understand uses of reproductive sciences for a queer lifestyle. I look forward to making more queer content with queer folks, across as many regional languages as possible.
My next film is going to be a Tamil feature, in which queerness is also going to be a part of the story, of a bigger picture.” Kashish 2022 screened 184 LGBTQIA+ films, including 30 from India, from 53 countries.
Other Asian films to win awards included “Warsha” and “Beirut Dreams in Color” from Lebanon; “The Third Solar Term” from China; “The Fish With One Sleeve” from Japan; and special mentions for “Coming To You” from South Korea and “Her Canvas” and “Kinaara” from India.“As South Asia’s biggest LGBTQ+ film festival, we are thrilled by so many Asian films winning awards at this year’s festival.
