As KASHISH Pride Film Festival returns for its 16th edition this June, the landscape of queer storytelling in South Asia stands at a quietly radical threshold. With the theme 'Love = Peace', this year’s festival extends an invitation—not just to witness but to reflect. Running from June 4 to 8 across three venues in Mumbai, including the newly added Cinepolis in Andheri and the returning Alliance Française de Bombay, KASHISH 2025 brings together a rich tapestry of stories from across the globe. These films don’t simply represent identity; they question borders, unearth silences, and in doing so, carve out space for tenderness and resistance alike.
Opening the festival is Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, an adaptation that already promises to stir up conversation for its stark, disenchanted take on intimacy. It’s a tale of emotional hunger and narcotic drift, anchored in Mexico City, where the meeting between two expats gives way to a longing that is more about absence than connection. Guadagnino’s treatment resists sensationalism, leaning instead into the loneliness that often underpins desire. Meanwhile, Jackie R. Bala’s A Life Inside Me returns the gaze inward, tracing the final months of Sitaram, who finally embraces his gender identity. The film unfolds as a parallel journey with his daughter, who must confront her own entrapment in an abusive marriage. Both seek liberation, in vastly different yet curiously intertwined ways.
In Onir’s We Are Faheem & Karun, the stakes are not only emotional but geographical. Set in the tense, militarised terrain of Kashmir, the film tells of an impossible love between a security officer and a local man — an encounter laced with secrecy, threat, and the ache of knowing it cannot last. It’s also significant as the first Kashmiri language film to center queer lives, marking a milestone in regional cinema. Across the border, in a different kind of battle, Amma’s Pride by Shiva Krish, brings a mother’s unwavering support for her trans daughter to the screen. Shot with simplicity and grace, it reminds us how radical ordinary love can be in a society that expects rejection.
Documentary as a form also finds a powerful anchor this year. Project Priyo, created by Rangeen Khidki Foundation, collects stories of five queer and trans individuals from various intersections like caste, class, gender, geography, offering a textured archive of lived experience. In Sudipta Kundu’s End of 14 Days, the pandemic becomes the unlikely setting for a devastating story of two Bangladeshi labourers, Bhola and Abbas, who are forced into quarantine on the fringes of their village. It’s a meditative look at intimacy born in confinement, and the fragile threads that hold human connection together in the most unexpected places.
Beyond the subcontinent, from Norway comes Fatherhood (Tre Fedre), a documentary following three men in a polyamorous relationship preparing to become parents. With one of them being among Norway’s first trans fathers, the film quietly explores the radical potential of chosen families, and how they challenge traditional ideas of kinship. Meanwhile, Patricia Ryczko’s Reset, set in a dystopian future, reads like a political thriller but lands emotionally with its portrait of a woman whose life unravels when her civil partnership is exposed. The film’s resonance lies not in its fictional technology but in its all-too-familiar mechanisms of state control and moral panic.
Snævar Sölvason’s Odd Fish brings a different texture to the line-up; gentler, melancholic, and tinged with wryness. Set in a small-town fish restaurant, it’s a story of friendship, transition, and small ruptures that change everything. When one of the co-owners comes out as a trans woman, their shared history is tested through the recalibration of affection and memory.
What stands out about this year’s selection is not just the diversity of stories or geographies, but the tonal breadth with which queer life is rendered. It's intimate without being confessional, political without being didactic, and moving without being saccharine. These films speak to love that persists in the face of erasure, peace that begins in recognition, and reconciling your own identity within a world that so often rejects it. At a time when polarisation defines much of our public life, KASHISH 2025 offers a countercurrent of humanity, above all else, as the common ground.
Find out about screening schedules and more via their website.
If you enjoyed reading this here's more from Homegrown:
Chosen Families & Queer Becoming: Inside The Nurturing World Of Indian Drag Motherhood
Aksomaniac's New Single Turns Queer Self-Discovery Into A Playful & Poetic Ritual
How Director Rohan Kanawade Painted A Queer Marathi Portrait Of Grief & Connection