Kiss 'n tell time

Empty Canvas is not an exception. A clutch of films at the Osian Cinefan have shown up varied images of sexuality, some critiquing it, others celebrating it. Aruna Vasudev, the festival's founder-director, calls them "bold unusual films". Latika Padgaonkar, part of the programming team, is taken in by the "audacity of the themes" of some of the Indian films. Clearly, edgy sexuality, traditionally associated with independent cinema of the West, is finding a definitive expression in Asian and Arab cinema as well.

Sexuality in each of these films is defined differently, according to the political, social, cultural and religious contexts of the nations that these films hail from. So Iranian actress-director Niki Karimi's One Night talks about transgression and infidelity but very, very obliquely. One night, young Negar is asked to sleep at a friend's place as her mother prepares to "entertain" a male guest. Negar cruises the streets of Teheran and meets three men who talk about their individual relationships with women. Slowly but surely the issues of philandering and deception, come to fore. As Karimi puts it: "The lies, the violence, the sex seethe under the surface and people look for a foothold in all of this." Sexuality then becomes a tool here to articulate the gender problems. "When the man is the focus of a film, no larger social questions are posed but with the woman as the central character, larger questions of community and politics also get explored," says Padgaonkar.

In some films, the attempt has been to use sexuality to break widely accepted cultural stereotypes. Borrowed Bride from Turkey shows the liberal side of Islam-the little known practice of borrowed brides which was prevalent in Turkey till the mid-30s, wherein women "instructors" used to "prepare" young boys for marriage. "What interested me was that sex education was practised freely through a respected institution at a time when strict Islamic codes were in force," says director Atif Yilmaz in a note.

So sex or sexuality is not an end in itself. Most filmmakers attempt to align sexuality with politics and social issues of the day as in the Algerian film, Viva Algeria. It focuses on three women, a former belly-dancer mother, her liberated street-walker daughter and a prostitute neighbour. Sexuality here facilitates a political debate and a critique of the increasing fundamentalism that's creeping into the social fabric. As director Nadir Mokn che comments: "There will always be people who will pretend that prostitutes, transvestites, vagabonds, alcoholics only exist in the West. Others will pretend that Algiers is a mosque open to the skies, that in the city's parks people do not make love, that they train themselves for jehad." Obviously he wants to show more.

So does Santosh Sivan. In Navarasa (Nine Emotions), he deals with the dilemmas of the third sex.Shot in a docu-feature style, the film is about a young girl who goes in search of her "cross-dresser" uncle to the Aravan festival at Villupuram in Tamil Nadu, an annual get-together of the eunuchs and transvestites. "It's a real story about real people. I wanted to create more empathy for the third gender, to give them a chance," explains Sivan while introducing the film.

Based on a true story, the Thai film Iron Ladies is about a team of transvestites and cross-dressers who hit it big in the volleyball circuit. In its simple and effective way, the film creates warmth and sympathy for its characters. In a very telling shot in the film, a lesbian takes a feminist stance against a male-dominated society: "All you are bothered about is your dick."

The most haunting film of the festival was also the most personal statement on sexuality. In Wong Kar-Wai's intoxicating 2046, sex becomes a symbol of lost memories, melancholia and alienation, of the longing for love and the inability to find it. The protagonist keeps moving from one relationship to another, causing pain and not finding true love himself.

And sex itself comes under the scanner in the most unusual film of the festival, Tsai Ming Liang's The Wayward Cloud. Veteran American critic Ron Holloway describes it as an attempt to turn pornography into art: "It pushes the edges, shocks the audience." Others may read it as a critique of sex, how sex has become a mechanical chore, how people are still unable to connect and communicate. As bizarre images of porn videos, melons, water bottles and lifeless dummy-like bodies pile on, only one issue stands out: the insignificance of sex.