Abar Jodi Ichha Koro (If You Dare Desire)

Debalina Majumder, a Berlinale Talent and Global Media Maker fellow, is an Indian filmmaker, cinematographer, still photographer, and media producer. Her work, which ranges from LGBTQIA+ issues to migration, climate justice, and citizenship, has been screened at prestigious international festivals, in classrooms worldwide, and in community spaces. Debalina’s pioneering filmography includes Joy Run, featured at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival, and A Stranger in a Bioscope, which was shot in Berlin as a ‘Movie of the Week.’ Her television work is equally groundbreaking; the episodes she directed for the reality show Satyer Arale are recognized as the first in any Indian language to focus on same-sex relationships. Her companion films, the documentary …and the unclaimed (2013) and the fictional recreation If You Dare Desire… (2014), powerfully addressed lesbian suicides in rural Bengal prior to the decriminalization of homosexuality in India. Her 2020 documentary, Gay India Matrimony, remains her most popular and controversial work, offering a tongue-in-cheek critique of marriage and homo-normative futures.

Nasima Islam is an Assistant Professor at Acharya Girish Chandra Bose College, under the University of Calcutta, India. She has done her M.Phil. on the rural Bengali Muslim women’s sphere of Murshidabad from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), India.  At present, she is pursuing her Ph.D. at CSSSC on the Miya Muslim question in Assam. She has co-edited Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature published by Routledge in 2022. Her research interest includes censorship studies, Minority Studies, Subaltern studies, intersections of gender, sexuality and other forms of marginality, etc. Her latest love has been her YouTube channel called The F Word: Feminism with Nasima, where she primarily attempts to popularise diverse kinds of discussion on feminism(s) and passionately advocates a feminist way of seeing.