Considered to be India’s first queer film, Badnam Basti is a melodrama of rare formal inventiveness that wraps its arabesques around a love triangle between two men and a woman. Based on the Hindi novel by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena, a prominent writer from Hindi literature’s progressive Nayi Kahani (“New Story”) movement in the 1950s in India, the book was later translated into English and titled A Street with 57 Lanes. Set in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Badnam Basti is a poignant story of the lives and loves of those who exist on the margins of society. From a bandit to a sex worker, a truck driver to a pimp, a hustler to a transgender dancer, the film takes us into a context in which social transgressions are made visible and queerness is explored and expressed through a filmic form that is experimental, subversive and wildly associative. The film was digitally restored by Arsenal–Institute of Film and Video Art, Berlin from the original camera negative and sound negative preserved at the National Film Archives of India. As the first reel of the camera negative was missing, Arsenal replaced the missing footage by using an English subtitled 35mm print from their own collection.
Shai Heredia