How queer filmmakers in India are redesigning cinema

Queer filmmakers in India have long worked at the margins of an industry that has profited from caricature while denying authorship. They have existed as punchlines, cautionary tales, or fleeting side arcs, but rarely as fully realised protagonists with interiority, desire, contradiction, and agency. Even in industries as prolific as Malayalam cinema, authentic queer representation remains startlingly scant.

It is a frustration that Ramdas Kadavallur (they/them) has witnessed up close. A documentary filmmaker from Kerala and co-founder of Clone Cinema Alternative—a Delhi-based platform for film screenings and debates—Ramdas also runs Art Book Cinema, a queer-inclusive production house dedicated to supporting marginalised voices on screen. Their work spans filmmaking, curation, and community-building. “The lack of authentic [queer] representation [in cinema] is stark,” they say. “Over 200 films release in Malayalam every year, yet queer representation is scarce. It’s disheartening to see queer characters used as comic relief or portrayed with ‘otherness.’”

For Ramdas, the challenge is not only aesthetic but infrastructural too. 

The infrastructure problem queer cinema in India still faces

“Finding funding and independent screening venues is a huge challenge. With few queer film festivals, films with queer content are forced into general festivals, where jury representation becomes a concern. Representation matters, not just in films, but in critique too,” shares Ramdas. Many filmmakers, they note, are still piecing together grants and community support just to create work, let alone distributed.

If Ramdas maps the struggle from the ground up, Aditi Anand (she/her) traces it across industries. A producer and co-founder of Neelam Studios and Little Red Car Films, she has worked across north and south Indian cinema, backing politically conscious, culturally rooted storytelling. Her films travel between theatres and festivals, across regions and languages, and she often thinks about how careers are built, not just how films are made.

“I’m always wary of turning this into a list because cinema doesn’t change through isolated geniuses, but through ecosystems,” says Aditi. What feels different now, she argues, is strategic. “Some filmmakers are no longer waiting to be absorbed into the mainstream system, and are building parallel pathways instead.” They are “writing material that travels across languages, working with international co-production markets, and designing films knowing they will live both in theatres and at festivals. That’s a production model shift,” she points out. 

Where earlier a single festival success was treated as a passport into the industry, she sees a generational refusal to “graduate”. “Now many are choosing to stay in that space and strengthen it.” The consequence, she says, is structural: “A generation of filmmakers is redesigning how films get imagined, financed, made and circulated.”

From solo creators to ecosystems: How queer film institutions are reshaping Indian cinema

At the intersection of culture and capital stands Mathivanan Rajendran (he/him), the Head of Innovation at the European Film Market (EFM) at the Berlinale, a BAFTA Breakthrough and Film Independent Fellow, and part of the pioneering team at The Storiculture Company. Having spent over a decade consulting in global technology before moving into film ecosystems, he views queer cinema not just as storytelling but as infrastructure. “There is a positive movement towards things that are more institutional,” he says. “Prior to this, it was just individuals pushing. But when you come together as a group or an institution, it has greater weight because institutions prefer working with institutions.”

Mathivanan sees workshops, labs, and collectives emerging as spaces where queer filmmakers can “actually find spaces to be authentic to what they want to say.” And yet, he is blunt about the limits: “We’ve innovated in several spaces, but where we haven’t is the aspect of funding.” Without deeper structural change, he cautions, progress will plateau. “Distribution is critical—and it’s broken. Today, the easiest way to distribute anything is when you have a community rallying behind it.”

Between Ramdas, Aditi, and Mathivanan, their arguments braid together: Ramdas calling for representation in juries and film critique; Aditi reframing career pathways and co-production models; Mathivanan insisting on institutional weight and funding reform. All three return, in different ways, to authorship: not merely who appears on screen, but who writes the script, controls the budget, shapes the edit, sits on selection committees, and ultimately decides how queer lives are framed, financed, and circulated.

“Queer characters must become the narrators of their own stories, not people being rescued or saved by well-meaning allies,” notes Aditi. Cinema, she reminds us, “is wildly political, and every choice to be ‘apolitical’ is a powerful political statement.” Mathivanan observes that “characters are no longer reduced to some page on a script, but they’re being perceived with more agency,” and that the older “tropes of suffering and torture porn are slowly fading.” Ramdas sees this shift filter outward: “The rise of OTT platforms and social media has opened up new avenues for diverse storytelling. Queer individuals can now tell their stories without waiting for traditional cinema’s approval.”

While the margins are still visible and the  hurdles are still real, the  pathways for queer cinema in India are gradually multiplying.

We list some of the most compelling up-and-coming queer filmmakers currently working in India. 

9 queer filmmakers in India to watch out for

Zena Sagar

One of India’s first trans women producers, Zena Sagar is part of a generation reshaping the industry not just through storytelling, but by influencing what gets developed, financed, and seen on screen. Currently studying Production for Film & Television at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute in Kolkata, she recently produced TARA, a 20-minute short that follows a Dalit trans woman navigating dating in Mumbai—a powerful narrative that refuses to separate caste from queer identity.

For Sagar, production is not administrative, but political. A producer decides which scripts move forward, which collaborators are brought on board, where funding is sourced and how a film is positioned for festivals or distribution. As Mathivanan argues, change happens when queer practitioners are no longer “solo warriors” but embedded within institutions and production pipelines. By occupying the producer’s chair, influencing development, financing and circulation, Sagar signals a shift from representation on screen to decision-making power off it. 

QueerFrames Screenwriting Lab by the Queer Muslim Project (founded by Rafiul Alom Rahman)

If the fault line in queer cinema has long been in development under the guise of scripts that never move beyond the page, the QueerFrames Screenwriting Lab is attempting to repair it. Founded by Rafiul Alom Rahman under the umbrella of the Queer Muslim Project, the lab has evolved from its pilot with Netflix in 2023 into a full-fledged fiction feature incubator dedicated to queer and trans writer-directors across South Asia.

With eight fellows selected in 2025, the programme combines intensive residencies with sustained mentorship, focusing not just on craft but on industry readiness, positioning projects to move from development into production. By building structured pathways, from script labs to international markets like the European Film Market, the lab shifts queer filmmaking from isolated effort to ecosystem. In a funding landscape that remains precarious, that scaffolding may be the most radical intervention of all.

Neeraj Churi

Neeraj Churi, a producer based in the United Kingdom, has spent years doing the unglamorous, structural work of getting queer films from script to screen, and then beyond, into global circulation. Of Indian-American origin, Neeraj founded Lotus Visual Productions to produce and promote films centred on LGBTQ+ communities, particularly from South Asia, where opportunities remain limited. His slate spans narrative and documentary features and shorts across India and the UK, including A Place of Our Own, which won the Audience Choice Award at SXSW 2023, and titles such as Sheer Qormaand Queer Parivaar.

For Mathivanan, producers like Neeraj function as crucial “interlocutors”; the people who understand festival markets, can raise funds internationally, and carry projects “all the way.” That continuity is rare. Aditi points to his championing of Rohan Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda, a Marathi queer film that came close to being India’s Oscar entry for 2025, as evidence of a deeper shift. Now, Neeraj is developing a new project with Himachal Pradesh-based poet and filmmaker Shubham Negi, extending his commitment to backing emerging queer voices from inception. “Neeraj is the change that we want to see,” says Aditi: a producer who backs projects from inception and knows how to position them across festivals, theatres and markets. Neeraj’s ability to bridge filmmakers back home with global capital and co-production networks is strategic and transformative.

Asawari Jagushte

Producer-director Asawari Jagushte is the co-founder of the trans-led Star Hopper Studio. With an MFA in Experimental Film from Kingston University and a body of work that has screened at BFI Flare, Outfest LA, Five Films for Freedom, and the Toronto Queer Film Festival, Asawari moves fluidly between craft and infrastructure. Their films stream across OTT platforms, reflecting a deliberate attention to circulation as much as creation.

As producer of Nihaarika Negi’s upcoming feature TENFA, set to premiere in the coming months, Asawari has been involved from development through positioning, including collaborating with Mathivanan on distribution strategy. It is this engagement that reflects the generational shift, which Aditi identifies as filmmakers “choosing not to graduate” from politically conscious spaces, but instead strengthening them. Asawari’s work signals continuity—nurturing projects, building recurring collaborations, and ensuring films live beyond a single festival moment. In doing so, they help transform queer cinema from isolated visibility into sustained practice.

Malini Jeevarathnam

Tamil filmmaker Malini Jeevarathnam has consistently highlighted the intersections of caste, gender, and sexuality in Indian documentary cinema, long before “intersectionality” became industry shorthand. Born in Paramakudi in Tamil Nadu and trained with a Master’s in Media Arts from Loyola College, Chennai, Malini assisted on films such as Madras and Aruvi before carving out a distinct voice of their own. Their work, spanning documentary and performance, centres LGBTQ+ lives within specific regional and caste realities, resisting the flattening of queer experience into urban, upper-caste narratives.

Mathivanan notes that queer storytelling is now expanding “across different parts of society, different regions, and caste to a certain extent.” Malini’s cinema embodies that shift. In line with Aditi’s belief that queer characters must narrate their own stories, their films treat authorship not as symbolism but as lived perspective, widening the vocabulary through which same-sex love, marginality, and resistance are understood in India.

Negha Shahin

Actor, writer, and filmmaker Negha Shahin occupies a rare position in Indian cinema. Based in Chennai, she became the first trans woman to receive the honour of a debut actor at the 52nd Kerala State Film Awards for her performance in Antharam. Her life story has since been included in Kerala’s Arts curriculum for class eight students, marking another first for transgender representation in the state’s education system.

But Negha’s influence extends well beyond acting. Founder of the nonprofit Queer Casting, she works to create equitable opportunities for trans and queer performers, while her training as a mental health counsellor has seen her support over a hundred trans women navigating stigma and social exclusion. As a filmmaker, directing projects such as Sandakaranga and writing Love Is Love, she embodies the generational move away from what Mathivanan calls the “usual tropes of suffering.” Her work insists on agency, authorship, and structural change, pushing back against the caricatured roles Ramdas critiques and demanding space both on screen and behind it.

Jijo Jessy Kuriakose

Kerala-based multidisciplinary queer artist Jijo Jessy Kuriakose works across film, photography, and visual culture, building a body of work that focuses on queer lives within deeply rooted regional contexts. His practice moves fluidly between mediums, but consistently returns to questions of faith, desire and cultural resistance, most notably in projects like Velipadu (The Revelation), which explores queer awakening through spiritual and sensory experience.

Ramdas identifies him as one of the voices pushing Malayalam cinema beyond tokenism. In a state that produces hundreds of films each year with minimal queer visibility, Jijo’s persistence reflects what Aditi describes as the exportability of authenticity: stories that travel precisely because they refuse to flatten themselves for the mainstream. 

Afrad V.K.

Kerala-based independent filmmaker Afrad V.K. announced himself with Riptide, his debut feature selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2024, a project that began as a diploma film and evolved into a fully realised, quietly radical love story. The film follows college roommates and lovers Suku and Charlie as they drift toward separation, weaving together romance, ghost story, and a bold pre-colonial digression. Shot in muted palettes and soft light, Riptide replaces the thumping machismo of mainstream Malayalam cinema with tenderness and emotional vulnerability.

Afrad’s work reflects the subtle but significant shifts Ramdas points to in regional cinema conversations around queerness that may not be loud, but are undeniably happening. In centring intimacy rather than spectacle, and desire rather than caricature, he moves away from what Mathivanan describes as reductive tropes of suffering. Emerging from Kerala’s growing queer creative network, Afrad represents a new tonal register in Malayalam film, one where queer love is neither cautionary nor comic, but simply lived.

P. Abhijith

Filmmaker and photojournalist P. Abhijith has steadily expanded the contours of queer and transgender storytelling within Malayalam cinema. As director of Antharam (2023), starring Negha Shahin, he helped bring a trans-led narrative to the fore, making it a significant milestone in visibility and recognition. His documentary I Am Revathi(2025) turns its lens toward the life of activist, writer and actor E. Revathi, tracing her journey through systemic discrimination toward self-assertion and public voice.

Through interviews, archival material, and intimate storytelling, I Am Revathi positions its subject not as symbol but as author of her own narrative, echoing Revathi’s declaration, “Njan Revathi” (“I am Revathi”). Ramdas’ observation rings true here: it is not just about telling queer stories, but about how they are told. In a regional industry where representation remains sparse, Abhijith’s films move deliberately toward dignity, interiority, and political clarity, aligning with Mathivanan’s sense that queer characters are finally being written with agency rather than reduced to trope.

Curated by Gaysi Family