The fifth Bangalore Queer Film Festival starts today and one of the organizers told Gay Star News that they are happy to be showing a lot of experimental films.

‘We are definitely seeing a sharp spike in the amount of experimental cinema we showcase, and that really makes us happy,’ said Poorva Rajaram.

‘One simple goal is to show films that people cannot easily access themselves and wild, conceptually queer short and long films certainly fit that mold.’

Rajaram said that her favorite screenings this year is a Filipino experimental film called Mondomanila.

‘It’s not a film that LGBT festivals around the world have played because it is clearly "queer" in the conceptual sense, not the in the sense of having self-actualized LGBT characters,’ said Rajaram. ‘Of all the films we are screening this year, it exudes a very particular and penetrating worldview.’

But the 55 films shown at the festival this year are not all experimental. The program includes How to Survive a Plague, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the AIDS epidemic in the US and Call Me Kuchu, about the life and death of Uganda’s first openly gay activist in Uganda.

BQFF is still mostly community funded, but gained corporate sponsorship this year in the form of delegate bags from Google and associate sponsorship from IBM.

Rajaram told Gay Star News in an interview last year that she has seen increasing interest in sponsorship of the festival from corporations since the festival started in 2008.

Watch the trailer for Ardhanaari, a film about transgender women in Kerala, here:

