Curating Queer Migrant Cinema Interview between Sudeep Dasgupta and James S. Williams

This chapter comprises an extended interview with the influential theorist and practitioner of queer European migratory cinema, Sudeep Dasgupta. As well as a leading figure in queer/migrant studies based at the University of Amsterdam, Dasgupta is co-curator and programmer of the annual Dutch International Queer and Migrant Film Festival. He talks here in enlightening detail not only about the selection process and criteria for the annual festival, but also about the often fraught relations between lived queer migrant experience and theoretical critique. Engaging with some of the key common themes running throughout the volume, notably the value of the aesthetic in rendering the relational experience of migration, he also considers his own personal journey and location and how they have informed his critical work and intellectual project, including the particular paradoxes of the Dutch situation – an ultra-progressive and gay-friendly territory with a proud self-image as a tolerant ‘guiding nation’ (gidsland), yet where the faultlines of homonationalism are now acutely visible.