Sridhar Rangayan’s Breaking Free (2015) is a 90-minute documentary on the LGBTQI movement in India until the great heartbreak of the 2013 Supreme Court judgment. Much like the four-part SC judgments, it explores the link between sexuality and love, questions of identity that the LGBTQI peoples have faced, the systemic abuses from family members, society as well as law enforcement agencies, while celebrating the collective will of the people who kept the faith.
The culture of cheating in Nattawut Poonpiriya’s ‘Bad Genius’ can be viewed as enabling social mobility and finding a place in a globalising economy where competition is fierce. Chuengcharoensuking plays the ambivalence and strange integrity of a noir protagonist to perfection who, even as she is on the run, must risk all to keep her word.
A school teacher’s relationship with immigrant students is a poignant dramatisation of the French integration process and its official ‘secularism’ in multi-ethnic France.