Director

Sridhar Rangayan

Sridhar Rangayan is a filmmaker who's been quietly revolutionizing Indian cinema for decades by centering queer stories when mainstream Bollywood largely ignored them. Born in 1962 in Karnataka, he's directed groundbreaking films like The Pink Mirror, Yours Emotionally, and Evening Shadows that refuse to look away from the realities of India's closeted LGBTQ+ community. His fearlessness comes with real consequences—The Pink Mirror remains banned by the Indian Censor Board—but his work has become essential viewing for anyone interested in queer cinema in South Asia. Beyond filmmaking, Rangayan co-founded The Humsafar Trust, India's first gay NGO, and launched Bombay Dost, the country's pioneering gay magazine, proving he's as much an activist as he is an artist. What makes Rangayan's work stand out is his commitment to nuance and empathy rather than melodrama. His films treat queer narratives with the same gravitas and intimacy that mainstream cinema reserves for heterosexual love stories, and that radical normalcy is precisely why they matter. He's also shaped the global conversation about queer Asian cinema through his jury roles at prestigious festivals like the Berlinale and by founding KASHISH, South Asia's largest LGBTQ+ film festival, which broke barriers by becoming the first queer festival to screen in mainstream Indian multiplexes. In a landscape where queer stories are still marginal, Rangayan's consistent output and institutional contributions have carved out space for visibility and representation that simply didn't exist before.