Unicorns: Cross-culture love story explores secret LGBTQ+ world

A love story between a light, bisexual, working-class engineer and a North Eastern Muslim drag queen is shining a light on an underwater LGBTQ culture.

The visually provocative so-called “gaysian” scene, which combines the terms queer and Asian, is explored by the feature film Unicorns, which introduces its beautiful drag queens.

Sally El Hosaini, who co-directed the movie with her lover James Krishna Floyd, said that many of the kings are closeted and only have a specific number of hours on weekends when they can really get themselves. Many of them also use nicknames and have been isolated from their people.

” On the surface]the gaysian image is ] extremely beautiful, really interesting… but underneath it’s actually a very dark, real and very a extreme world”, added Floyd.

” They’re a majority within a majority… they’re getting attacked and rejected from all sides, from popular culture, from South Asian societies for the most part, from their religious societies for the most part and from the popular LGBTQ society as well”.

Floyd, who even wrote the story, said he and El Hosaini- who is half Welsh and half Ancient- were keen to discover “fluid names”.

” For me personally as a half Indian, half English guy who has had sexually fluid experiences… mainstream culture is always putting all of us in very neat little boxes”, he said.

” I find that very frustrating and just so limiting”.

He said he had “always known about the gaysian scene” but was properly introduced to it by his friend Asifa Lahore, who in 2014 became the UK’s first Muslim drag queen to speak publicly about her work.

Producer on the movie is Lahore.

” Everything in the film is based on either Asifa’s experiences, my own experiences or South Asian drag queens that I now know very well- it all comes from reality”, said Floyd.

Ashiq ( played by Jason Patel ) works in a shop by day but at night transforms into drag queen Aysha, dancing for a largely South Asian LGBTQ audience.

When single father and mechanic Luke ( played by Bohemian Rhapsody and former EastEnders actor Ben Hardy ) miserably discovers Aysha is a drag queen at a club, they exchange a kiss and move on.

Patel, who plays Aysha, is not a real-life drag queen but many of the supporting cast are.

El Hosaini and Floyd received audition tapes from a number of South Asian drag queens after receiving a casting yell-out on social media.

” A lot of those tapes were very moving”, said El Hosaini.

Some of them said,” I do n’t care if I get this role, but the fact that this is being made about this kind of character and exists,” she said.

Someone had taped their conversation in a bathroom and was speaking very quietly because their family was present and they did n’t want to be overheard.

” It was another moment of just reminding us why we’re making this film”, added Floyd.

” If we were making this film for anyone, it was for the gaysian community… because there has n’t been a film about them, certainly not a fictional feature film”.

Floyd and El Hosaini, who live in London and have a son together, first met when Floyd starred in El Hosaini’s directorial debut feature film My Brother the Devil.

He starred again in her second feature film The Swimmers.

Unicorns is Floyd’s directorial debut and the pair’s third time working together.

What’s it like to collaborate on a movie with your partner?

” We first met in work, so we had that creative connection before our relationship”, said El Hosaini.

” When you do what we do and you’re so involved, we are each other’s rocks and support”.

She claimed that the project was” as old as our son, so it was actually like a child that had grown up in our family” when Floyd began working on Unicorns nine years ago.

” Coming together to make it all work just felt natural and appropriate,” she continued.

El Hosaini, whose mother is Welsh and father is Egyptian, was born in Swansea, raised in Cairo and returned to Wales at 16 to study at UWC Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Ffilm Cymru Wales provided funding for Unicorns, and it will be shown in a special way at the next month’s Green Man Festival in Powys.

El Hosaini said,” The industry has frequently seen my Egyptian side and seen me as Arab, so I’ve been sent a lot of projects that always have an Arab perspective.”

” But I’m equally as Welsh as I am Arab, it’s definitely in my bones, my blood and part of me and I think it’s just time until I do my Welsh projects”.

Floyd and Floyd both expressed frustration with the limited number of films that can be seen in theaters.

” This industry is not very kind to minorities and it certainly is n’t kind to minorities within minorities”, he said.

” There’s such an imbalance. How many films do we need to make about- and I can say this as a half-white man- privileged, white, middle-class, cis, heteronormative men? Do we need any more of those? No, we do n’t”.

He claimed that one of the benefits of storytelling was that it could “light up those communities that we do n’t really hear about.”

” There’s more that connects us than divides us”, added El Hosaini

Unicorns is currently available in UK and Irish theaters.