On the final day of Pride Month, we move past rainbows and hashtags to explore the quieter, more intimate victories of queer storytelling in India. Amid the noise of mainstream media, these three short films stand out for their refusal to conform — each a testament to lived experience, radical tenderness, and the courage to simply be.
🌊 Anureet Watta: Just Living, Queer
Director Anureet Watta isn’t interested in making digestible stories. “I could not find representation in the films I watched,” they say. “So I made my own world.” With a unique blend of poetry and experimental filmmaking, Watta creates space for queer emotion outside clichés.
Their past works — Kinaara (2021), described as a “poem in motion”, and Oranges in the Winter Sun (2022), a meditation on soft gestures — paved the way for their upcoming piece Don’t Interrupt While We Dance. It’s a bold exploration of queer rage — not just survival, but protest.
“I think my first audience is people who are looking for themselves in these stories,” Watta says. “There’s a bit of liberation in accepting that I am only one part of this work — but I trust my peers to do the rest.”
🌼 Chandradeep Das: Love in the Autumn of Life
Chandradeep Das, a Bengali filmmaker, finds love where others forget to look — Jasmine That Blooms in Autumn explores queer love among the elderly, a demographic often erased from romantic cinema.
Winner of Best Indian Narrative Short at KASHISH 2025, the film follows Indira and Mira, two women in an old-age home navigating newfound intimacy. Visuals like jasmine garlands and half-eaten paan add quiet beauty to a slow-burning connection that is both restrained and raw.
“Feelings have no age bar,” Das says. “You can fall in love at the end of everything.”
The film’s gentle honesty reminds us that queerness isn’t just for the young, and desire can evolve without fading.
🌲 Neel Soni: A Documentation of Solitude
The only Indian film to make it to the 2025 Student BAFTAs, Babli By Night is Neel Soni’s documentary about Babban, a trans forest officer in Uttarakhand’s Jim Corbett National Park.
“I never went looking for a subject,” Soni says. “But Babban’s story found me.”
Set against the backdrop of forest serenity and personal upheaval — including HIV/AIDS diagnosis and the pandemic — the film follows Babban’s path to quiet self-acceptance.
“Babban said, ‘I just want to be happy, in the forest with my animals.’ That’s what stayed with me.”
More than a profile, Babli By Night is a meditation on queer solitude, nature, and resilience.
🎬 Reclaiming the Narrative
These films don’t shout — they listen. They don’t force change — they reflect what already exists and has long been silenced. As Pride Month ends, this is the kind of representation that matters: rooted in nuance, pain, joy, and above all, truth.
Because sometimes, just seeing yourself on screen — honestly, quietly, fully — is the most radical act of all.