A free LGBT film festival in a country that’s still struggling with issues surrounding homosexuality is a great idea, but of course it costs a lot of money to put on. Kashish, the most mainstream queer film festival in Mumbai, is now turning to crowd-funding to try and make its vision of free access to gay movies a reality.
The idea of the festival is to encourage, ‘greater visibility of Indian and International queer cinema among both queer and mainstream audiences as a means to foster better understanding of queer thoughts, desires and expressions’. It runs from 23rd to 27th May and plans to show 120 films, all for free.
Festival co-director Sridhar Rangayan says: ‘The idea for crowd funding Kashish was more of a necessity, because with no government support and not too many corporates yet enthused about supporting a queer event, we felt it was time to involve the community.
‘The film festival is a not-for-profit event and one of few festivals of its kind in the world that does not charge ticket prices or a registration fee. We are committed to keep the festival free this year too and to achieve this we thought what better way than crowd-funding.’
If you’d like to help out with this great idea, you can head over to the festival’s crowd-funding page.
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