2025

Rongdhonu Mela 2025

On November 22-23, 2025, Sappho For Equality (SFE) hosted a Queer-Trans-Disability flea market, bringing together 46 entrepreneurs from marginalised intersectionalities of queer, trans, disabled and single women communities, and more than 27 performers. Apparels, eateries and delicacies, handicrafts, art materials, badges & fridge magnets, ethnic wear to casual wear, diverse cuisines, beauty accessories, painting and photography, diaries and notebooks, and more.

Renowned singer Lopamudra Mitra and community band Alor Opera performed on 22nd November. On 23rd November, the all-female hip-hop collective Wild Wild Women took the stage, opened by Adamya, a transmasculine music band from West Bengal, followed by a much-anticipated drag performance by Naaz. The event also featured several performers from the community and beyond, including Monami Nandy (Odissi), Sangram Mukhopadhyay (Contemporary), Jhelum Gupta (Stand-up Comedy), Tushar Roy (Belly Dance), Manjima and Mehboob, Shreya Acharya and Kingshuk Batabyal (Classical), and Abby (Singer), among others.

Bioscopia Kolkata Queer & Trans Film Festival 2025

On December 13 and 14, 2025, Sappho for Equality (SFE), supported by the Goethe-Institut /Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, organised Bioscopia: Kolkata Queer & Trans Film Festival 2025. It is a transitional yet deeply intentional offering, a temporary home for queer and trans cinema in Kolkata during a year of organisational reflection and rebuilding. Emerging from the long legacy of DIALOGUES, it holds the emotional, political, and cultural weight that the festivals have carried for over eighteen years.

It is not simply a new name; it is an act of care, an act of continuity. A quiet promise to the community that our stories will not be paused, even as structures shift around us. At a time when queer and trans lives continue to face precarity, erasure, and surveillance, Bioscopia insists on presence, on visibility that is tender, political, and defiantly joyful. The festival is rooted in queer-feminist politics, based on the belief that cinema can hold contradictions, carrying grief and celebration in the same breath, and making space for those at the margins of society. Through films from India, Bioscopia brings together narratives of longing, homecoming, anger, resistance, kinship, pleasure, survival, and the everyday magic of queer-trans life