Queering Indian documentary: an interview with Debalina Majumdar

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although documentary filmmaking in India has a long tradition, one rarely sees any serious engagement with LGBTIQ issues. However, in the recent times, a new body of LGBTIQ documentaries either by heterosexual directors or by filmmakers who identify themselves as LGBTIQ, using a variety of formalistic styles, foreground intimate and multiple expressions of LGBTIQ subjectivities in their films. As a filmmaker who approaches LGBTIQ issues from inside out, Debalina Majumdar belongs to such a group of distinguished LGBTIQ filmmakers who documents homophobic violence, queer desires and forgotten queer histories. Her documentary films celebrate queer lives, emphasizes LGBTIQ rights and imagines queer futures through forging a nonconformist visual politics and through a range of poetic articulations. For her, filmmaking is a practice of reclaiming suppressed LGBTIQ desires as well as a mode of institutionalizing LGBTIQ identities. Debalina Majumdar in the present interview with Rajesh James and Sathyaraj Venkatesan discusses her filmic self, her engagement with LGBTIQ resistance movements in India and her documentary practices.