Blackwell Reference Online

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In the summer of 2005, I attended at San Francisco's Castro theater a sold- out screening of Sancharram (The Journey) , an independent feature film by the Chicago-based, South Asian diasporic filmmaker Ligy Pullappally. I had heard that Sancharram was a lesbian-themed film set in Kerala, a state which runs along the south- western edge of India, where my family is from and where I regularly visit. But nevertheless I felt an unexpected jolt of intense recognition as the lights dimmed and the first scene opened with a shot of an old tharavad (an ancestral, joint family household), its distinctive architecture of sloped tiled roofs and solid teak pillars looking remarkably like that of my own family. As the camera panned a landscape of lush forests and waterfalls, I was convinced that the film was set in precisely the same small town in central Kerala where my own tharavad is located; the final credits confirmed my suspicion. Watching this familial, familiar landscape, oddly defamiliarized in the context of viewing it translated onto the screen, at the Castro, surrounded by an appreciative queer San Francisco film festival audience, made me wonder about the ways in which representations of the regional (Kerala, in this case), and its particular logics of gender and sexuality, become intelligible within transnational circuits of reception and consumption. This essay represents ... log in or subscribe to read full text