KASHISH Pride Film Festival 2026 opens in Mumbai with Jimpa and 154 queer films

South Asia's biggest queer film festival opens in Mumbai this week with 154 films, Olivia Colman and a Teddy Award winner

The 17th KASHISH Pride Film Festival opens in Mumbai on 3 June with Jimpa, the queer family drama starring Olivia Colman and John Lithgow, directed by Sophie Hyde. Colman plays Hannah, a filmmaker who brings her non-binary teenager to Amsterdam to reconnect with her gay father. Aud Mason-Hyde plays the teenager in a performance critics have called quietly devastating. The film centres queer joy rather than queer crisis, which is a choice worth noting.

The festival runs until 7 June across three venues in South Mumbai: Liberty Cinema, Alliance Française and, for the first time, the National Gallery of Modern Art. KASHISH has been held in mainstream cinemas since its founding in 2010. The NGMA is a step beyond that.

The opening film

Jimpa is not a film about suffering. It is about love that has been interrupted by time and the different shapes people take when they rebuild. Lithgow, as the gay father who has been absent for years, plays someone who knows exactly what he chose and what it cost. Hyde's direction keeps the film from becoming either sentimental or punishing.

Spain as Country in Focus

Spain brings four features and 13 short films in Spanish, Catalan and Galician. The strand opens with Love and Revolution, a multiple Goya Award winner directed by Alejandro Marín, set in 1970s Spain and following a mother who becomes involved in the gay rights movement at a time when coming out carried real legal consequences.

Ivan and Hadoum, directed by non-binary filmmaker Ian de la Rosa, won the Teddy Award at Berlin 2026. It follows Ivan, a trans masculine person in Southern Spain, and his newly hired co-worker Hadoum. When Ivan receives a long-awaited promotion, the relationship between them reaches a turning point. Silver Chicón plays Ivan and is nominated at KASHISH for Best Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay and Best Performance in a Lead Role.

Marco Berger's Astronaut Lovers is a queer romantic comedy following Pedro, openly gay, and Maxi, fresh out of a relationship with a woman, through a summer friendship that neither of them manages to keep platonic. The festival closes with Maspalomas by Aitor Arregi and Jose Mari Goenaga, about an elderly gay man who hides his sexuality after moving into a nursing home. Shot across the dunes of Gran Canaria and the Basque Country, it is a quiet, unhurried film about what people carry alone.

A panel discussion on cinema, culture and tourism between Spain and India runs alongside the strand as part of the 2026 dual year of culture and tourism between the two countries.

Four films worth your attention

Dreamers, directed by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, is a UK film about two Nigerian women who fall in love in Britain. One is undocumented. Gharoro-Akpojotor has been building a body of work in Black British queer filmmaking that deserves far more attention than it gets, and this is her most accomplished film to date. It has been quietly doing the festival rounds without the noise it merits.

Narmook, directed by Ghazal Zoghinia, was made in Iran in Baluchi and Persian, two languages that rarely appear in international queer cinema. Details on the plot are sparse in the press materials, but the film's existence and its journey to Mumbai say something on their own. Making queer work in Iran under any circumstances carries risk. Making it in a minority language reduces the audience who might report it. It is here anyway.

What the Sky Forgot, co-directed by Akshit and Amrita, makes its world premiere at KASHISH this year. A short film in Hindi and Urdu, two languages that rarely share a frame in Indian cinema for reasons that have nothing to do with geography and everything to do with politics. The title in Urdu is Khawab Ho Tum Ya Koi Kabootar, which translates roughly as Are You a Dream or a Pigeon. That alone signals a sensibility.

From Male and Female, an animated short by Bassem Ben Brahim from Tunisia, travels the furthest distance of any film in the programme in more than one sense. Tunisia still criminalises homosexuality. Animation provides a layer of distance that live action cannot. The film is in Arabic and has no distribution path in its home country. It is at KASHISH regardless.

Sixty-one films centring LBT and non-binary voices

Sixty-one of the 154 films specifically centre lesbian, bisexual, trans and non-binary experiences, across dedicated packages and standalone screenings.

Narrative features in this strand include Daniel Ribeiro's Brazilian drama I Am Going to Miss You, about a mother-daughter relationship tested by distance and desire. The Cambodian and Chinese co-production Whisperings of the Moon by Yuqing Lai, the Indian Marathi-language feature A (Dis)liked Story by Sai Deodhar and the French film Amantes by Caroline Fournier complete the narrative features in this strand.

Documentary features include Life of Kai, a UK film by Fox Fisher following a trans child and their family, and the Mexican and Italian co-production On the Path to Leo by Ana Bárcenas Torres.

Among international shorts, the Turkish short Krizalit by Naz Tokgöz and Aranxta Ibarra, Showtime from China and Switzerland, and Blue from Brazil round out an international set of perspectives. The animation programme includes The Eating of an Orange, a UK short by May Kindred-Boothby.

What KASHISH is

KASHISH was founded in 2010 by Sridhar Rangayan and Saagar Gupta. It was the first LGBTQ+ film festival in India to be held in a mainstream cinema and the first to receive approval from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. India decriminalised homosexuality in 2018, but sixteen years of KASHISH represent something the courts did not provide: a sustained and visible public platform for queer Indian stories. The festival has been named one of the top 15 film festivals in the world worth travelling for, alongside Sundance, Rotterdam and Berlin.

The 2026 edition is happening under financial pressure. Shifting global funding policies have left KASHISH in genuine difficulty and the festival is asking its community for support.

Full programme and donations at mumbaiqueerfest.com.

‍