‘I want my film to demonstrate that queer South Asians can thrive.’
Image credit: BBC
“What might a marriage between a queer, South Asian, and brown person look like? What would it be like for an older, South Asian queer person to come out?”
These are some of the questions Shiva Raichandani, 29, pondered while making Queer Parivaar, their debut short film.
Shiva, who is non-binary and refers to herself as they/them, also wanted to do more with the film, something they hadn’t seen much of on-screen or in stories involving LGBTQ+ people of colour.
In Hindi, the word “parivaar” means “family,” and the film is about an LGBTQ+ couple whose wedding is disrupted by a ghost from their past.
“While queer has been used as a derogatory term in the past, many LGBTQ+ persons now use it as an umbrella term to describe their identify or refer to their community.”
Queer Parivaar is a riot of colour, comedy, and love that honours the concept of family, both blood relations and the chosen family that many LGBTQ+ people have.
It had its world premiere at this year’s BFI Flare, a prominent LGBTQ+ film festival in London, in March.
Shiva was motivated by their personal experience as non-binary South Asian people when co-writing the film, which viewers of Britain’s Got Talent may have seen in 2017 with the London School of Bollywood and Marvel fans will witness in sequences alongside Kumail Nanjiani in 2021’s Eternals.
The NHS defines gender dysphoria as “unease caused by a mismatch between a person’s biological sex and gender identity.”
The film was co-written by Shiva and colleague Amani Saeed, and it was filmed with a cast and crew from the LGBTQ+ community and funded through crowdsourcing.
Shiva claims that their family’s immediate reaction was to wonder “how do we cure this” and be concerned about their humiliation.
Music drives the story in Queer Parivaar, as it does in the best Bollywood-inspired films, and the soundtrack includes new LGBTQ+ performers like Leo Kalyan and MNEK, as well as more traditional South Asian music from Oscar-nominated singer Bombay Jayashri.
Despite the fact that the film is about queer life in general and queer South Asian lives in particular, Shiva claims that the concepts portrayed are universal.
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