Freddie, We Hardly Knew You

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More About

• Freddie Mercury
• Mumbai
• Calcutta
• Queen (Band)
• LGBT Issues

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Farrokh Bulsara’s parents were from Gujarat, so it wasn’t an unusual choice to send him to a boarding school near Bombay (as it was called then). He adopted the name Freddie pretty early on, but it wasn’t until his mid-20s — after his family had emigrated to England and he’d finished art school, been through a couple of bands, and formed Queen — that he swapped his last name for something more, um, electric. A decade ago (and nearly a decade after his AIDS-related death), the performance-packed documentary Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story excavated details of the singer’s adolescence in India. 3rd i’s Queer Eye, the South Asian film festival’s first LGBT minifest, revisits those roots and rocks the house with the S.F. premiere of Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story (Director’s Cut 2010). Earlier in the night, 3rd i’s perennial affection for both short works and India’s many moods is reflected in “Queer South Asian Shorts,” whose centerpiece is a half-hour documentary, Are We Talking Straight?, which compiles Calcutta residents’ views on homosexuality.
Sun., June 6, 5 p.m., 2010