Swara Bhaskar and Divya Dutta have been roped in to play romantic partners in the film Sheer Kurma, directed by Faraz Arif Ansari. Faraz, also directed India’s first silent LGBTQIA+ film Sisak. He describes the movies as “a gentle story, with a backdrop of religion and sexuality.”
The film also stars Surekha Sikri, and traces the journey of a queer woman searching for a sense of belonging, identity, and acceptance from her family. In a conversation with E Times, Faraz talks about his idea of the film Sheer Kurma and the difficulties he faced to get the project started. He revealed that the first hurdle was to find a producer to finance the subject, as most wanted a film on male LGBTQIA+ protagonists, rather than female.
“I was reaching out to a lot of production studios in India, and all of them had one thing to say - ‘we are only looking at films that have a male protagonist’. ‘Humein mard chahiye, film ke liye’ and ‘Aaj kal gay films kaafi cool hai’ - that’s what they told me,” he said.
“Even in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, they want the story leads to be masculine; they don’t want women’s stories to come out. They think they are being very progressive by saying we are making LGBTQIA+ cinema or we want to make LGBTQIA+ cinema, but the minute you say the story is about two women, they’ll start balking.”
Faraz also stated that the hypocrisy isn’t limited to only producers, but also the actors and filmmakers in Bollywood. “I know many leading actors in Bollywood, who have a huge amount of reservations when it comes to playing sexuality that is not mainstream,” he said.
He further added, “They aren’t making these from a genuine point of interest, but just to have a variety on their plate. The reason that Bollywood doesn’t have a queer film on the main front is that there is a great amount of homophobia and transphobia in Bollywood.”
Talking about why he decided on Swara and Divya as leads in the movie, Faraz said, “Divya and Swara are two celebrated names in the industry and strong allies of the LGBTQIA+ community. It was an easy decision to approach them. In fact, when I started writing the film, I had Divya in my mind, and already saw her playing this role. The day I finished the script, I put up a status on Instagram saying I need someone to play the role, and Divya was actually the first person to call me. It was kind of bizarre that both of them were thinking on the same lines. Without even reading the script, she said she wanted to do the film.”
“Swara is someone who is gentle and yet so powerful. There is a certain kind of vulnerability that she has that would win your heart. She is the perfect person to play the character. Both of them never had any reservations about playing a queer or lesbian character, which speaks volumes about who they are as individuals.”
Faraz added that they’ll wrap up the shoot of the film by December this year.
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