Rainbow Rishta review: A heartwarming docu feature about queer people and their quest for love

Rainbow Rishta review: This one talks about queer individuals and the struggles they face in their pursuit of love and basic rights as human beings! 

Rainbow Rishta review: Love is crazy, fun, beautiful, and the most inexplainable emotion, and falling in love is finding and sharing that space of comfort where we can completely be ourselves with all our vulnerabilities on display to coexist as equals. Who doesn't want that? Rainbow Rishta with its six-part docu feature talks about this basic right to love and how everyone deserves it and it does this without trying to other the queer community. 

A VICE Studios production, the unscripted docu-series delves into six real-life love stories of queer people that go on a quest for love. And its makers - Jaydeep Sarkar, Hridaye A. Nagpal, and Shubhra Chatterji make sure that these stories don't feel like 'us vs them'. Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju, a doctor, actor, and creator, after being done with casual relationships, yearns to find a real partner who is her equal so she turns to online dating. Sadam Hanjabam, an introvert, is a social activist who works for the queer community in Imphal but is still haunted by his own traumatic past of abuse and addiction. He finds it extremely hard to be vulnerable with a new person face to face. Fear of showing their real face stops a human rights lawyer and drag artist, Lush Mosoon aka Aishwarya Ayushmaan as well from finding love as they haven't come out to their parents yet. 

Aneez Saikia and Sanam Choudhary, a young cute queer couple from Guwahati face society's non-acceptance as they hunt for a befitting home together. Another couple, Soham Sengupta and Suresh Ramdas, who have been with each other for six years, strive to find stability and balance in their relationship. Daniella Mendonca, an intersex woman, who in spite of being sold to the hijra community and gang raped in the past, is full of life. She desires to have a dream wedding in Bhayandar with her fiance Joel, but financial and everyday troubles make it hard for her. These stories might be a tad too focused on a specific issue in the lives of these people and while their lives are much more than this one particular aspect, their struggles make them relatable and universal.

Also Read: Taking the representation of queer onscreen conversation ahead

The access allowed the makers to dive deeper into the personal lives of their subjects but they never treat anyone as fodder for their drama, rather they give them space when needed, which makes it a wholesome watch. Rainbow Rishta takes ahead the conversation of representating the LGBTQIA+ community especially onscreen. When we see these real people navigate through the lanes of the real world, it takes them out of the lavish boxed-in clutches of the fictional world. The music and the message of the show are all heart!

Even the intercuts between these six stories in spite of these people coming and going throughout the six episodes bind them together in a narrative with sharp contrasts. You could say that the series at times is wearing rainbow-tinted glasses when looking at the lives of its cast as it could have gone a bit deeper. But does that create a problem? Absolutely not! As the absence of the legal sanction for same-sex marriage hovers over (the show could even become a petition for it), Rainbow Rishta becomes an emotional and educational docu-feature to tell you that queer people are not that different from the rest of the world. After all, who doesn't want to build a home with an understanding life partner while wearing a beautiful wedding gown? 

Rainbow Rishta is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video! 

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