On a Queering Voyage: How a young filmmaker is creating art for the community

Although Indian cinema – encompassing both commercial, mainstream, and regional features, as well as documentaries – has begun discussing queer lives and the issues surrounding them, it is still grappling with numerous challenges, even within the filmmaking industry. ‘Don’t Interrupt While We Dance’, in that case, is a groundbreaker.

This short film, produced in March of this year, was crowd-funded with the support of people from various backgrounds, including friends, strangers, students, activists, and other members of the queer community. The major cast and crew also belong to the queer community, with the young filmmaker, Anureet Watta, being a notable example. “The film reflects on joy—how it is interrupted and how anger is often denied to those at the margins,” they say.

“As I speak to you today, we have 183 supporters, who have given us 50,100,1000 rupees and made this film possible,” they say, adding that original songs were a must for the film, and, for that, Watta credits the endless nights with Geetanjali Kalta. “I like to believe that we came up with anthems that are based on the joy of a community in the present-continuous tense,” the 24-year-old from Delhi rejoices. 

The story of the short film revolves around the six queer friends situated on the cusp of queer joy and rage. However, in Anureet’s words, this film did not gather the “institutional support in the Indian film industry due to the radical themes and my persistence towards having a majorly queer cast and crew.”

Anureet Watta, who has received the ‘Emerging Voice in Indian Cinema’ award for their debut screenplay, Ruli Hui Nazmein (‘These Beat Up Poems’), is also a Writer’s Ink Screenwriting Lab alum (2023). The screenplay has captured magical realist story of two queer people in Delhi in 1984, set against the backdrop of the assassination of the Prime Minister and the rising women’s movement.

Young mind exploring queerness through art forms

For the experimental filmmaker, it is about working with people who are queer and for whom these stories are “not just the experiments which can be let go off”. “The process and the people of a practice also inform it, when cis-het people turn to make queer films, they can simply put these truths down once the film is over, that is not the case for my films where there are the producers who are queer along with the other people involved.”

However, Watta’s creative pursuits do not end with filmmaking. As a poet and writer, they reject the idea that art should necessarily be likeable, and their characters are allowed to be free. “It’s a fallacy that we watch films to befriend characters,” they assert. “The grandeur and perversity of cinema should be preserved.”

Not only through filmmaking, Watta has been aiming to voice queer issues through other forms of art, such as writing and poetry. It was the 2017 when they started writing poetry, as an exploration of the “queer self and the queerness of the systems of power in India’s current political climate”. 

Anureet Watta, then, also moved on to writing for the theatre, followed by the films. Their debut poetry chapbook, ‘Lusture of a Burning Corpse’ surrounded the themes of violence, hate, polarisation in current day India, along with the inherent violence of being queer - and love. “Love, of course, which is the antidote to most of this,” they say. 

About changing the artforms, Watta opines, “Writing across mediums, language has been a source of wonderment given the precarious state of queerness in our lexicons, invention happens within a form as much as outside of it.”
But what unifies the art forms that Anureet has been religiously talking about in a recent conversation with us is how the “political art” can be avoided, while the necessity of “making art politically”. “I am interested in exploring queerness as an evolving understanding of where I live,’ they say adding with questions that well describes their intentions: “What would queer rage look like - that which pushes the boundaries of respectability? How intrinsic is it to our ways of being and our ways of imagination?”

“Further, in the landscape of hate that India is painted in right now”, they continue, “What is art that is not just reactionary but reflective - that doesn’t dissipate in the washing machine of democracy but turns the wheels of it.” Amidst the socio-political landscape of the country, Watta asserts that they are not interested in exploring queerness as a conflict, but rather, as a way of seeing, wherein they “constantly reconstructs lexicons, speculates on alternative futures and informs my work in gaze and structure through nonconformist techniques.”

Layers in the writing and why it is important

Discussing their film journey, Anureet Watta’s films, ‘Kinaara’ and ‘Oranges in the Winter Sun’, have been screened at 34 international film festivals, including Fringe! London, Images Toronto, Melbourne Queer Film Festival, and more. 

The filmmaker has been experimental with even these two. ‘Kinaara’, made on a no-budget with a cellphone, is a revisionist history piece that captures the lives of two queer women through the partition of India in 1947. 

On the other hand, Watta has also explored the intersection of queerness in the underworld, setting the plot in the T2 cultural city of Lucknow. Their feature film screenplay, ‘Muskuraiye Aap Lucknow Mein Hai’ (Kiss Marry Kill), is a dark comedy that follows two two lesbian gangsters as they grapple with desire and crime in Lucknow and pushes the boundaries of moral corruption, negotiations with an unjust world and embraces the capacity of queer evil and queer failure against a neo-noir setting.

“I think my non-conformist techniques come from not having studied and trained in conventions. Moreover, I am very keen on ‘queering’ processes as much as the final product of the film. I am interested in exploring queerness as an evolving understanding of where I live."

Talking about their upcoming novel ‘These Beat Up Poems’, which they describe as a ‘Carrier Bag’, as Ursula Le Gun elucidates, Watta states that the novel borrows much from history, which has been absent from the contours of the mainstream. 

Adding to it, they describe that one particular element that unifies all their writings across media. “I don’t want to just tell a queer story, I want to queer the telling itself.”