17/06/2026
When Cinema Refuses to Reduce a Story to a Label.
South Asia's leading LGBTQIA+ film platforms have long made space for stories that challenge prejudice — and this year's KASHISH Pride Film Festival, held June 3–7 in its 17th edition, deepened that conversation further, bringing together over 150 films from 40+ countries.
For PVB Studio, this terrain has never felt unfamiliar. From Porojibi and Prantik to Preet Na Mane R**t, Atmojo, and the RESH anthology, PVB's young filmmakers grew up treating LGBTQIA+ realities as simply human stories — not novelties, not provocations.
That made the response to RESH in 2021 all the more telling. Instead of being read as nuanced human narratives, the films were repeatedly flattened in parts of the media into "same-sex films" — reductive, sensational, and in some cases excluded from festivals altogether. For the young directors, the reaction was baffling, especially in a post-decriminalisation India.
The larger truth remains — cinema can humanise where headlines often refuse to. One film at Prayasam's 13th B*W Food Film Festival continues exactly that legacy: a love story that is same-sex in subject, but universal in feeling.
