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 Bina Bhattacharya is a 21-year-old bi chick film-maker. She discusses
feminism, race, disability, sex, and more with Cath Davies.
Born in Annandale to a fourth-generation Irish-Scottish Australian historian and a radical Marxist Indian academic, Bina Bhattacharya (aka Beanz/Les Beanz) found herself transported from the inner west of Sydney because her parents felt “there wasn’t enough diversity in the trendy suburbs for them to feel comfortable”.
From these beginnings sprang her sense that the ‘personal is political’, such as her intense pride in being educated at a Western suburbs public school, where over 90% of her classmates came from a non-English speaking background.
Combined with time spent at her father’s home city of Calcutta in India, this upbringing gave her insight “into a variety of different cultural and religious groups and an understanding of poverty that I wouldn’t have received had I attended a private school”.
In addition to this, her parents’ interracial marriage “made me think about fucking and politics from a young age and gave me permission somewhat to think outside the square when it came to love and sex”, something which shows in her forthright assertion of her bisexual identity. Initially she resisted the term bisexual.
“I felt like it was a term I had no ownership over, one that had been co-opted by male heterosexual porn,” she explains.
“Most people think of bi chicks as pretty girls who make out with their female friends in crowded bars for drinks or attention. That’s not what I’m about at all. I do like the ‘queer’ label too but I think that in many ways, proudly reclaiming the bi label is a far more radical challenge to the status quo. I feel radical bisexual women should come out of the woodwork and demonstrate the variety of bisexuals out there.”
Bhattacharya’s first foray into directing films came at around the age of seven, when she had a group of mates over “all dressed up as little girls do, with me bossing them around to perform a script I’d written, and telling my Baba (father) that he was filming it wrong”, and then later at 14 when she made a short film with some friends about about a boy who runs over a stray cat and has to decide what to do with it.
From there she became involved in a film where “a group of non-white actors wanted to star in a film they had written themselves because it was their only chance to play non-stereotyped roles”.
“There was this Egyptian guy, very funny and very talented, saying that for once he wasn’t going to have to play a terrorist or a plumber,” she says. She also worked on a promotional film for Mt Druitt’s Women’s Activities and Self-Help House.
For the final year of her BA (Media Arts and Production) at UTS, Bhattacharya made a short film about a woman with a disability who works in phone sex and has an out-of-body experience. “I wanted to explore the sexuality of a woman who hates her body but forms evocative and sexy relationships with people using her brain and voice,” she says.
Having chronic eczema since a very young age, and a childhood spent relying on others to help apply lotions and change bandages gives Bhattacharya unique insight into how bodies are viewed and portrayed. As she grew older she realised that she often disagreed with other feminists about pornography and sexuality. “I figured out that this was because I’d grown up with a disability. When you don’t look normal, you have to fight to be viewed sexually.
Your body is treated as a lab specimen; doctors and strangers look at you and tell you what’s wrong with you. It bothers me insanely that the message we get from TV and the movies is that sex and love belong exclusively to the young, beautiful and predominantly white. I want to make films that show sex is for everyone. In fact, if anything, people with disabilities are far better lovers in my opinion because they experience their body in such a different way.”
Although not a huge fan of Bollywood “because I’m a Bengali intellectual snob – Indian readers will understand that!”, she loves Satyajit Ray’s “poetic, subtle films that deal with Indian political issues such as class and colonisation by examining people’s personal relationships” and also Todd Solondz, David Lynch and Hal Hartley.
Her favourite films include the Aussie Angel Baby, about two people with mental illness who fall in love and have a child, The Finished People, made in Cabramatta which “completely embodies what I believe are the empowering aspects of filmmaking and storytelling” and her all-time pick Mysterious Skin. [It’s not] just because Gregg Araki is also bisexual and biracial! It’s such a beautiful and an eerily sensual film about such a shocking subject matter.”
The same could be said for Bhattacharya: beautiful and sensual in form yet often quite shocking in content. Not to mention full of beanz.
Bina Bhattacharya is currently working with another bi chick on a documentary about bisexual women, and is looking for participants. Contact her at
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