The Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF) 2010 —CALL FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

Concept

Understanding one’s own sexuality is a struggle, telling your family is one thing, but finding a rag-tag bunch of people who you will share your desires with is another. The search is for broad chests of reassurance, shared cigarettes, gossip exchanged over too many cups of coffee because the idea of queerness is as much about this new family as it is about lovers. While lovers reassure the physical explorations of sexuality, the queer family is there to wrestle with the barfly at your local standing bar, to make difficult decisions for you: be it the college you want to go to or the colour of the skinny jeans that suit your eyes. Also, there are simple visions of queer intimacy away from the physical, simple moments that makes us human yet queer without distinction. Moments that are as much about the spectacular, but also about the private.

The Bangalore Queer Film Festival 2010 turns its eye to its queer family and asks you to do the same in photographs. The photographs need not be an exercise in the photographic arts as much art of simple aesthetics and articulation of queer togetherness.

And please send this to people you think would be interested.

How do I submit my images?

Firstly, edit those images down. We don’t want all 500 pictures you took, just the best of the best. When you have the photos cut down to a reasonable number, make sure to Zip these files together before sending it (make sure you name the zipped file – “storyname_yourname”). You have to enclose captions or image titles on your submissions, and a short bio about yourself. Email the zipped files to blrqueerfilmfest@gmail.com – if the zip file is too big use yousendit

Where will the selected photos be exhibited?

The selected images will be shown at the Atrium in Alliance Française de Bangalore during the BQFF 2010 from 26th to 28th February 2010.

What is the last date of submission for the images?

10 February 2010.

bharatsikka.com

["Jaddu ki" (Magic) Cigarette - usually hash]

As Harzatbal’s evening call for prayer resounds over the Dall, Ajaz walks through one of Srinagar’s many martyrs’ graveyards.

The young man in worn-out jeans and a body hugging tee swaggers past unkempt tombstones counting friends and family that are buried there – there were 21 of them. He tells me how he can still see the smiling face of Mushtaq, who was his senior at school, who would have been 27 this January. He tells me about another friend, Javed, who was his parents’ only son. The day he died, he was wearing Ajaz’s clothes. Javed had come to our house in the morning through the and changed there. Javed was 23, and Ajaz still remembers even six hours after his death, when they took him for burial, blood still oozed out of his bullet wounds. Every epitaph standing on a grave tells a story – a tragic story of a generation.

[Ajaz, 23 has no interest in studying or any real quantifiable aspirations, except for having fun. He is apathetic to the political situation. He hangs out at 8 ball snooker den, a place where he can the violence and bandhs of the old city.]

Ajaz lingers for a bit, starring-glassed eyed into a distance, till he eventually snaps out out of it.

“Enough of this tragedy, let’s go have some fun.”

Ajaz is part of Kashmir’s “lost generation”, an entire generation of youth who have growing up with in Kashmir ravaged in 20 years of turmoil. They are a generation numb with no real ambitions or motivations, just pre-occupied with a struggle for survival. Ajaz spends his days at 8 Ball, a smoky snooker den at Lal Chowk, in the city center. The parlour is inhabited by 15 to 20 year olds, innocent and trying hard not to be. Some were tougher than others, but there was a limit to how much trouble they can find at 8 Ball. This is their home turf, a place they escape the tear-gas and rubber bullets of the old city – to gamble and smoke all too many cigarettes. Some of the older boys like Ajaz sometimes walk to the football ground nearby showing off their hair, their sunglasses, their cigarettes, their tattoos and sometimes even their girls.

[A parlour scene at 8 ball snooker den. The parlour is inhabited by 15 to 20 year olds, innocent and trying hard not to be. Some were tougher than others, but there was a limit to how much trouble they can find at 8 Ball]

Ajaz puts flame to a little block hashish and watches it crumble into his palm. Sajid, a boy with the hard cheekbones and a black jacket with a woven trim, empties tobacco from a cigarrette with his long and delicate fingers. He looks mad for some reason but continues on diligently. If you look at them closely you get a sense of over grown teen-age urgency and escape, the sense that all these details– the part in the hair, the length of the fingernails, the jacket trim, the cigarette grip — matter greatly.

“Smoking up is Haram. But I can’t go through a day without rolling one. It help us forget,” Ajaz tells me as Sajid grunts in approval.

Ajaz’s cellphone rings to a polyphonic rendition of song from Ghajini, it’s Farhana. They flirted awkwardly on the phone, the conversation seemed no different than one two lover would have in Mumbai. There was some romance in Srinagar after all. Ajaz first stopped at Broadway Cinema, a bombed out theater the upper floors of which have been now converted into a bar. A couple of beer cans were procured and cigarette cartons refurbished. He then waited at the earlier decided rendezvous point. Farhana waited till she was in the rickshaw still she let Ajaz light her cigarette. She was dress respectably in a salwar kameez but she admitted that she only like wearing jeans and tops at home.

“I want to go to Delhi or Mumbai, so that I can wear a skirt and be free – just like in the movies,” she told me as the rickshaw sped toward the Dal Boulevard.

Ajaz waited till they were on the Shikhara to suprise Farhana with a can of beer. She popped it open and sipped as the boatman frowned yet at the same time maneuvered them further away from the orthodoxy of Srinagar. They steel a kiss as a dark pummel of smoke makes itself visible over the city.

[Ajaz and Sajid smoke at the Fair Grounds in Sringar. The conversation meandered, as it always does in Kashmir, into what they call the ‘Kashmir masla’ — the issue. “Keep us this side or that side, how does it matter, we just want to get on with our lives,” said Sajid]

[Kashmir finds itself in a new the grips of a new found religious orthodoxy, where it is not socially excepted for young Kashmiri women to wear western clothing. Where as young men have almost abandoned pheran for t-shirts and their salwars for jeans.]

[Scuffles break out often at The 8 Ball snooker parlour in central Srinagar. They are usually results of bets gone wrong, the older boy usually break them up before it gets ugly.]

[Farhana, 21 is Ajaz's girlfriend - sips her beer as she laughs on a Shikhara on Dal Lake. It is one of the few places she can be herself away from the prying eyes of Srinagar's moral police. Farhana drink and smokes discreetly and thinks the two habits to be both an act of rebellion and modernity.]

[A broken fountain behind the Hazratbal Mosque in Srinagar. Signs of violence are never far]

A SEAT of power for more than a thousand years, the city-state of Delhi is a survivor of conquest and change. New Delhi the location for our third photographic street intervention, after Bangalore and Paris we head to Delhi.

THE LOCATION : Cannaught Place

Today, new money has conquered the inner circle of C.P making it the capital of a rapidly changing India. Spiraling rents have put a Swarovski shop where a small independent bookshop once stood, and in the same market, a shop called It’s All About Bling sells spangly earrings. Away from Retail chains that are fast taking over the early 20th-century colonnades of the outer ring we made the middle circle of Connaught Circus our gallery on the streets.

Armed with over 700 A3 photography prints we started near at the N Block and we pasted out way around the circle till we were back at Pallika Bazaar.

Tenzin Dakpa showed

Queen of the Hills

The Precious Gift

Blindboys contributor Ishan Tanka showed a photoessay on Cricket in Kashmir and couple of other of works.

Blindboys Contributer Aditya Kapoor showed his photo-essay – As they Are

Our very own Kapil Das showed  90% of my mind is with you, Baston sur le mekong and other random work

Kaushik Ramaswamy’s conceptual work on an urinal, looked mighty cool

I showed, pictures from my Gulabi Gang Series and some from No Time for Love in Srinagar.

You can now enjoy the offical Video !

Blow up in Delhi! from lenskap on Vimeo.

Here are some pictures !