Joyland + Discussion Group

As the Ranas - a happily patriarchal joint family - yearn for the birth of a baby boy to continue the family line, their youngest son secretly joins an erotic dance theatre and falls for an ambitious trans starlet.

Their impossible love story slowly illuminates the entire Rana family’s desire for a sexual rebellion.

Discussion Group

After the screening, there will be a discussion group facilitated by Nat Raha to decompress together and unpack the themes and topics explored in the film.

Please note that the discussion group is exclusively for anyone who is a person of colour (POC) or identifies as LGBTQ+.

This screening is presented by Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF) in collaboration with Begana: Musing on Queer South Asian Stories (programmed by Neha Apsara).

About Nat Raha

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, a South Asian British trans queer femme, and a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her books of poetry include Of sirens, Body & Faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018) and Apparitions (nines) (Winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, forthcoming 2024). Recent critical and creative writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, 100 Queer Poems, Transgender Marxism, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’, 2021). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is currently co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).