1 month ago
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Filmmaker Onir’s We Are Faheem & Karun has won the Hivos Free to Be Me Award 2026, to beryllium presented astatine the Roze Filmdagen Festival successful Amsterdam. The grant is fixed to filmmakers who make enactment enhancing LGBTQI+ acceptance and visibility, and honours courageous, taboo-breaking stories.
The citation reads, “This year, the grant goes to Indian manager Onir’s We Are Faheem & Karun. In this gripping film, we travel 2 men who bash not uncertainty who they are, but are confronted with an situation that tries to marque them invisible. Their emotion communicative unfolds against the backdrop of governmental tensions and subject beingness successful Kashmir, wherever each deviation is intimately controlled.”
“We Are Faheem & Karun is not conscionable a communicative of love, but besides an enactment of resistance. A movie that shows however intimacy and humanity tin proceed to exist, adjacent erstwhile determination is minimal abstraction for it, precisely what the Free to beryllium Me Award stands for.”
Onir said, “Thank you to the assemblage astatine Hivos and the squad astatine Roze Filmdagen for archetypal nominating our movie and past celebrating it arsenic the victor of this precious award.
“I americium overwhelmed and humbled and honoured to beryllium conferred this prestigious award. This validated one’s journey. As we hole for a June merchandise of our film, this grant means a batch not conscionable for maine and the full formed and crew, but for the queer voices from South Asia and elsewhere wherever we are inactive warring for the rights to unrecorded arsenic equals., to defy invisibility.”
