Sanghum Film is pleased to invite you to the 20th anniversary screening of Ian Iqbal Rashid's TOUCH OF PINK (2004). For this special occasion, Rashid will be in attendance, along with several members of the cast and crew. The screening will be preceded by introductory remarks from actor and writer Bilal Baig.

For the past few years, Sanghum Film has been talking about building a program related to Desh Pardesh and the radical tradition of queer South Asian film in Toronto that forms the context for our work. It wasn't long before we realized that we wanted to highlight the work of Ian Iqbal Rashid. We felt that his long-standing contributions to supporting queer South Asian expression were simply extraordinary – from setting up Desh Pardesh in the early 1990s to co-producing the award-winning CBC series Sort Of in the early 2020s. He has spent a lifetime dedicated to cultivating the film infrastructure necessary to support storytelling about the relationship between sexuality, gender and religion within and beyond South Asian communities. For this program, we return to director Rashid's delightful debut feature, TOUCH OF PINK (2004).

This romantic comedy tells the coming-out story of Alim (Jimi Mistry), a gay, Muslim, Indo-Canadian man who lives with his British boyfriend Giles (Kristen Holden-Ried) in London, UK. When Alim's watchful and widowed Ismaili mother Nuru (Suleka Mathew) decides to visit from Toronto, he seeks emotional guidance from imaginary friend and confidante, the ghost of queer, classic Hollywood moviestar Cary Grant (Kyle McLachlan). A Doris Day-fangirl herself, an unaware Nuru dreams up nuptial prospects for her son. A dramedy of errors ensues, with a heart-warming mother-son relationship at its center. Nodding to the Grant/Day-starrer That Touch of Mink (1962), Rashid's British-Canadian aughts romp offers an inventive, intergenerational update to the singular cinematic tradition of conservative yet cheeky sex-comedies of 1950s-60s Hollywood. In turns both raucous and tender, TOUCH OF PINK (2004) unfolds as a charmingly risqué, rosily transcontinental, queerly familial affair.

Reflecting on the possibilities for life in the midst of oppression and alienation in the introduction of the 1995 Queer Issue of Rungh, Rashid invited his readers to learn how “to speak in a radical accent, the popular language of our times, […] the language of pleasure, adventure, liberation, gratification and novelty.” In many ways, this quotation captures exactly what Rashid accomplished with TOUCH OF PINK (2004). The film imparted a diasporic vernacular of gay liberation that Rashid had developed during his time at Desh Pardesh in 1990s Toronto to gay Muslims and South Asians around the world. It offered a new grammar to make sense of those parts of life that were left unspoken and under-analyzed within South Asian diaspora families – sexuality and the body; violence and trauma; desire and imagination. Over the past twenty years, Rashid has regularly received thank you notes and messages of gratitude from film watchers around the world who have used the film's insights and particular dialect to powerfully re-shape their own lives for the better.

We look forward to welcoming and celebrating Rashid, the cast and crew, and everyone in the broader Toronto arts community who have made this legacy of queer South Asian filmmaking possible in the first place.