The Kashish Pride Film Festival returns to Mumbai from June 3–7, 2026, with 153 films from 43 countries, spotlighting queer cinema, trans narratives, and the changing realities of queer communities in India.
For 17 years, the Kashish Film Festival has held a singular place in India’s cultural landscape. Returning this Pride Month, from June 3 to 7, the festival transforms Mumbai into a meeting ground for queer cinema, conversation, and community — bringing together 153 films from 43 countries across Liberty Cinema, Alliance Française de Bombay, and, for the first time, the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA).
Founded in 2010, Kashish Film Festival started at a time when queer representation in Indian public life was marginal and often criminalised under Section 377. In the years since, the festival has evolved into one of South Asia’s most important platforms for LGBTQIA+ storytelling and cultural dialogue, documenting both the progress and precarity shaping queer life in India today. This year’s theme, ‘Reflect, Resonate, Rejoice’, stands out in a zeitgeist marked by simultaneous visibility and vulnerability.
While legal victories, such as the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 2018, transformed public discourse, queer communities in India continue to confront deep systemic inequalities. Trans and non-binary people remain disproportionately vulnerable to unemployment, housing insecurity, family violence, and social exclusion, even as the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, undoes many of the Queer- and Trans-inclusive provisions introduced in the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. Corporate Pride campaigns and streaming-era representation have expanded visibility, but these campaigns too often privilege urban, upper-class narratives, while many queer Indians continue to navigate hostile familial, religious, and institutional spaces in rural India. In such a society, festivals such as Kashish Film Festival function as both cultural events and crucial sites of solidarity, memory, and collective self-fashioning.
The 2026 edition opens with ‘Jimpa’, a multigenerational drama starring Olivia Colman and John Lithgow about queer family histories, reconciliation, and chosen kinship; and features special presentations, including ‘Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri’s Story’, which revisits the life of Bengali jatra legend Chapal Rani, and Dibakar Banerjee’s ‘Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2’, which interrogates identity and digital alienation in the algorithmic age.
This year’s programme also foregrounds global queer solidarities. Spain — the festival’s ‘Country in Focus’ — brings a curated showcase of queer Spanish cinema alongside conversations on cultural diplomacy, tourism, and inclusion. New sections such as ‘Genderation Shorts’ centre stories of youth, gender fluidity, and belonging, reflecting Kashish Film Festival’s ongoing commitment to trans and non-binary narratives at a time when these communities are increasingly targeted worldwide.
As reactionary politics and culture wars reshape public discourse across the globe, Kashish Film Festival continues to insist on queer visibility as lived reality. It remains an evolving archive of resistance, joy, grief, and imagination — a space where cinema becomes a way of witnessing how queer communities survive, remember, and continue to dream.
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