International
KASHISH 2023 to open with Onir’s feature Pine Cone
Mumbai: The edition 14 of KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, South Asia’s biggest LGBTQ+ film festival will open on 7 June at Liberty Cinema with filmmaker Onir’s latest film Pine Cone, which will have its world premiere at the festival.
National Award winning filmmaker Onir said, “I and the entire team of Pine Cone are thrilled that our film will have the world premiere at KASHISH which I consider to be home. This is for the first time that any of my films is having a world premiere in India and it’s special for many reasons. It comes at a historic time when the Supreme Court of India is debating Marriage Equality. Our film is a celebration of queer love seen from a queer gaze, and it gives me immense pleasure to bring it to my city at this very precious festival”.
The festival will close on 11 June with the Canadian feature film When Time Got Louder, directed by Connie Cocchia, who identifies as an LGBTQ+ director, producer, and writer. The film is a coming of age drama of a young lesbian girl, and her family bonding with her autistic brother starring Willow Shields (Hunger Games), Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost), Lochlyn Munro (Riverdale), and the debut performance of Jonathan Simao. The film also involved the autistic and LGBTQ+ communities throughout production in casting, crew and music selections.
Founder festival director Sridhar Rangayan said, “The Opening Film and Closing Films are really special as they bookend the festival and mark the beginning of a conversation and also flag off ideas for future conversations. We are opening and closing with films by queer filmmakers, involving queer artists and technicians! That is surely the right way ahead”,
“In that sense Pine Cone from India and When Time Got Louder from Canada are two films that are unique, because the first is about contemporary gay relationships in India post Sec377 reading down; and the second is a film that explores intersectional relationships between queerness and disability. Both films are sure to leave a mark long after you have exited the theatre and make you reflect upon life”, he elaborated.
KASHISH 2023 will screen 127 films from 45 countries out of which 110 films from 41 countries will play at the on-ground edition at Liberty Cinema and Alliance Française de Bombay.
The festival will also have panel discussions, performances by the queer community and allies, workshops, interactive sessions and a film pitching session for your LGBTQ+ filmmakers to make their next short film.
LOS ANGELES: Acting has never been an easy profession, but in recent years, it has acquired a new existential anxiety. Artificial intelligence can now mimic faces, clone voices and, in theory at least, speak any language it is fed. The fear that actors may soon be replaced by algorithms no longer belongs exclusively to science fiction. And yet, despite the rise of digital inauthenticity, some performers remain stubbornly resistant to replacement. The reason is not celebrity, nor even talent. It is language.
On paper, this should not be a problem. AI can translate. It can imitate accents. It can string together grammatically correct sentences in dozens of languages. But acting, inconveniently, is not about grammatical correctness. It is about meaning, and meaning is where AI still falters.
Machine translation offers a cautionary tale. Google Translate, now powered by neural AI, has improved markedly since its debut in 2006. It can manage menus, emails and airport signage with impressive efficiency. What it struggles with, however, are the moments that matter most: idioms, metaphors, irony, and cultural shorthand. Ask it to translate a joke, a threat disguised as politeness, or a line heavy with emotional subtext, and it begins to unravel. Acting lives precisely in those gaps.
This matters because film language is rarely literal. Scripts, particularly in independent cinema, rely on figurative speech and symbolism to convey what characters cannot say outright. Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is a useful example. The film’s recurring use of red operates on multiple levels: grief, desire, repression, liberation, and memory. These meanings are inseparable from the Spanish cultural context and emotional cadence. A translation may convey the words, but not the weight they carry. An AI-generated performance might replicate the sound, but not the sense.
This is where multilingual actors gain their edge. Performers such as Penélope Cruz and Sofía Vergara do not simply switch between languages; they move between cultural logics. Their fluency allows them to inhabit characters without flattening them for international consumption. Language, for them, is not an accessory but a structuring force.
Beyond European cinema, this becomes even more pronounced. Languages such as Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and underpin vast cinematic traditions. As global audiences grow more interconnected, the demand for authenticity increases rather than diminishes. Viewers can tell when a performance has been filtered through approximation. Subtle errors, misplaced emphasis, and an unnatural rhythm break the illusion.
There is also a practical dimension. Multilingualism expands opportunity. Sofía Vergara has spoken openly about how learning English enabled her to work beyond Colombia and access Hollywood roles. But this movement is not a one-way export of talent into English-speaking cinema. Multilingual actors carry stories, styles and sensibilities back with them, enriching multiple industries at once.
Cinema has always thrived on such hybridity. Denzel Washington’s performances, for instance, draw on the cultural realities of growing up African American in the United States, while also reflecting stylistic influences from classic Hollywood and Westerns. His work demonstrates how identity and influence intersect on screen. Multilingual actors extend this intersection further, embodying multiple cultural frameworks simultaneously.
At times, linguistic authenticity is not merely artistic but ethical. Films that confront historical trauma, such as Schindler’s List, rely on language to anchor their moral seriousness. When Jewish actors perform in German, the choice is not incidental. Language becomes a site of memory and confrontation. It is difficult to imagine an automated voice carrying that responsibility without hollowing it out.
This is why claims that AI heralds the death of language miss the point. Language is not just a delivery system for information. It is a repository of history, humour, power and pain. Fluency is not only about knowing what to say, but when to hesitate, when to understate, and when to let silence do the work. These are not technical problems waiting to be solved; they are human instincts shaped by lived experience.
AI may one day improve its grasp of metaphor and nuance. It may even learn to sound convincing. But acting is not about sounding convincing; it is about being convincing. Until algorithms can acquire memory, cultural inheritance and emotional intuition, multilingual actors will remain irreplaceable. AI may learn to speak. But it cannot yet learn to mean.
In an industry increasingly tempted by shortcuts, language remains stubbornly resistant to automation. And for actors who can move between worlds, linguistic, cultural, and emotional, that resistance is not a weakness, but a quiet, enduring advantage.
