Skadi Loist

Queer * Media * Industry * Studies

Skadi Loist

20 Years Perlen – Queer Film Festival Hannover

perlen_2016_header

The Perlen (Pearls) Queer Film Festival Hannover is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. As part of the anniversary celebrations I have been invited to speak at the opening of the 20th edition, 17 October 2016, and give a brief overview of the history of queer film festivals and queer cinema in Germany and internationally. Looking forward to be part of the celebrations for this member of QueerScope, the network of independent German queer film festivals.

 

Queer Academy Film Summit / TEDDY 30 / Berlinale 2016

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the TEDDY award, the LGBT/Q film award at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) the Queer Academy put on a Film Summit to discuss queer archiving and queer film festivals in practice on February 17, 2016 at the Station Berlin,  Luckenwalder Str. 4-6, 10963 Berlin. As a continuation of the discussion that was started at the Queer Film Culture: Queer Cinema and Film Festivals conference in Hamburg in October 2014, the organizers invited me to moderate the panel on queer film festivals in practice.  (See the program below or view the booklet online.)

The Queer Academy is an annual convention of international filmmakers and
festival organizers in the gay-lesbian-transgender context (2015 figures: 180
persons/institutions) at the Berlinale. The Queer Academy aims to establish
itself as an institute of queer cultural memory. The Academy will become an
archive of queer culture and history that binds together queer cultural productions
and cooperates with other organizations. Since memories are essential for
the identity construction, the Queer Academy will offer an opportunity for queer
people to form and find their identity in queer memory.

Summit Program

10.00am  Opening Wieland Speck, Berlin, Curator of the Panorama at the Berlinale

10.15am  Keynote: Bob Hawk, Film and Festival Advisor

10.30am  Keynote Jan-Christopher Horak, Los Angeles, Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive

10.45am  Panel 1: Re-imagining the Queer Archive

PANEL 1: Re-imagining the Queer Archive

While researching for the TEDDY 30 retrospective, it only became too clear: Feature films, video art and amateur movies around the world are about to vanish and need to be restored, digitized and distributed. Archives are facing a challenge in order to prevent the analogue film stock from decay. Furthermore, it will be a crucial task to re-invent models of distribution to make our queer film heritage part of our cultural memory.

QueerAcademy_Panel1_(c)SkadiLoistQueer Academy Summit, Panel 1: Nanna Heidenreich, Dagmar Brunow, Martin Körber, Chery Dunye, Alice Royer, Andreas Kraß  (c) Skadi Loist

Participants:

  • Dr. Nanna Heidenreich, host, Institute for Media Studies, Braunschweig University of Art; Arsenal-Berlin, Forum Expanded, Berlin
  • Alice Royer, Legacy Project Manager, Outfest Los Angeles; American Archive for Television and Film, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Prof. Martin Koerber, Head of the Archive at the “Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen”, Berlin
  • Prof. Dr. Andreas Kraß, Department of German Literature, Humboldt University; Director of the Archive of Sexology, Humboldt University, Berlin
  • Dr. Dagmar Brunow, Institute for Film Studies, Linnaeus University, Vaxjö, Sweden
  • Cheryl Dunye, Filmmaker, Department of Cinema, San Francisco State University, Liberia/San Francisco

For more background on the panelists and their take on programming see the Teddy Award blog.

 

Vachon_Ashraf_QueerAcademySummitChristine Vachon & Toby Ashraf  (c) Alice Royer

1.30pm  In Conversation with Christine Vachon moderated by Toby Ashraf

Christine Vachon is an “Independent Spirit Award” and “Gotham Award” winner who co-founded indie powerhouse “Killer Films” with partner Pamela Koffler in 1995. Over the past decade and a half, the two have produced some of the most celebrated American indie features including Far From Heaven (nominated for four Academy Awards), Still Alice (Academy Award winner), Boys Don’t Cry (Academy Award winner), One Hour Photo, Kids, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Happiness, Velvet Goldmine, Safe, I Shot Andy Warhol, Camp, Swoon and I’m Not There (Academy Award nominated). In television, Vachon recently executive-produced the “Emmy” and “Golden Globe” winning miniseries Mildred Pierce for HBO and an upcoming series on Amazon based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald. Other recent work includes: Kill Your Darlings, Magic Magic, Carol directed by Todd Haynes and Wiener-Dog written and directed by Todd Solondz.

2.15pm Panel 2: Queer Film Festivals in Practice – Programming and Curating Strategies

PANEL 2: Queer Film Festivals in Practice

Almost four decades ago, the first Gay Film Festival opened back in the day in San Francisco. Since then much has happened and those now called Queer or LGBTQI* Film Festivals have flourished and expanded in all cultural backgrounds all over the world, most recently new festivals have been founded in Africa and also the Middle East. The growing number of festivals also fostered different and more diverse programs within the Queer Film Festival Circuit. From classical queer/LGBTQI*content to pornography and from the avant-garde to activism; six programmers from different cultural backgrounds will talk about their view on curating and activism on this panel.

QueerAcademy_Panel2_(c)DagmarBrunow Queer Academy Summit, Panel 2: Skadi Loist, Alexandra Carastoian, Des Buford, Sadaat Munir, Joao Ferreira, Xiaogang Wei, Jürgen Brüning  (c) Dagmar Brunow

Participants:

  • Dr. Skadi Loist, host, Department of Media Studies, University of Rostock; Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival
  • Alexandra Carastoian, FAQiff – Feminist and Queer International Film Festival, Bucharest
  • Desiree Buford, Frameline – San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival
  • João Ferreira, Queer Lisboa – International Queer Film Festival
  • Saadat Munir, AKS Film – Art – Dialogue Festival, Pakistan and Denmark
  • Xiaogang Wei, Beijing Queer Film Festival
  • Nosheen Khwaja, GLITCH QTIPoC Film Festival Glasgow
  • Jürgen Brüning, Porn Film Festival, Berlin

For more background on the panelists and their take on programming see the Teddy Award blog.

3.45pm Break

4.00pm Programmers/Queer Academy Meeting + the Queer Connection

Following the Panel discussions, the annual Programmers/Queer Academy Meeting will take place. This is the place where new festivals are presented, new cooperations established, as well as, organisational and content practices are discussed. Filmmakers and distributors are invited to discuss their works directly with festival makers in the framework of the Queer Connection and therefore to already set the first festival screenings during this event. In addition to filmmakers and distributors, who present the films included in the current Berlinale programme, local Berlin filmmakers and producers are welcome to personally show their projects.

Queer Film Festivals as Activism, Manchester, MMU

As a follow-up event of the Queer Film Culture: Queer Cinema and Film Festivals conference that took place in conjunction with the 25th Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg International Queer Film Festival in October 2014, Jon Binnie and Christian Klesse at the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) organized the two-day symposium “Queer Film Festivals as Activism.”  They invited me to give a keynote lecture at the event on 5 February 2016.

 

Queer Film Festivals as Activism: An International Symposium

Since the 1977 queer film festivals have proliferated across the globe and provided an opportunity for the enjoyment and popularisation of films on queer and LGBT themes that may be otherwise difficult to access in mainstream cinema. They are important events for the production of queer community. Furthermore, queer film festivals provide an alternative to a purely commercial scene providing opportunities to come together for the enjoyment of film culture and discussion. What is the role played by such festivals in nurturing visions of what a queer world could be? How important are these film festivals in articulating agendas around LGBTQ politics in different geographical and political circumstances? As new queer film festivals continue to proliferate, what needs, desires and agendas do they address? What motivates those who organise them? What roles do they play in the lives of those who attend them?

These questions and others will be addressed by this two-day international symposium at MMU. The event will bring together festival directors, programmers and academic researchers to discuss the practical, organisational, theoretical, political and cultural issues associated with queer film festivals. The symposium keynote will be presented by Dr. Skadi Loist from the University of Rostock.

Convened by Dr. Jon Binnie in the School of Science and Environment and Dr. Christian Klesse in the Department of Sociology. Since 2008, they have jointly researched the geographies of transnational geographies of LGBT and queer activism in Central and Eastern Europe. Their current research is concerned with queer film festivals as a form of cultural activism in different European cities.

PROGRAMMEFriday 5th February 2016

15.00 Introduction and welcome
Jon Binnie and Christian Klesse

Keynote_Manc_(c)DagmarB(c) Dagmar Brunow

 15:30 Keynote: Performative Intervention: What does Lampedusa have to do with Queer Film Culture?  

Skadi Loist, University of Rostock 

Twenty-five years are a considerable time-span for a queer community organization.  Thus, the 2015 opening night of the Hamburg Queer Film Festival was envisioned as a moment of proud celebration of the festival’s 25th anniversary: a feature-length documentary about the festival—which will also screen in this symposium—was to be premiered, a conference on the topic of queer film culture took place and the mayor of the city was to open the festival.  However, instead of becoming a smooth glamorous night, community activists intervened and disrupted the opening.  The event and its surrounding discussions nearly sent the festival and its volunteer collective into an identity crisis.  What exactly had happened?  In a nutshell: the appearance of this local top official became the epitome of the clash of radical queer activism, neoliberal city marketing and cultural politics, that the queer film festival is positioned between.  Using this incident as an example, in this talk I will unravel the various stakeholder demands that queer community film festivals have to negotiate in order to function as platforms that champion queer film and filmmakers, remain independent and open for political and identity articulation, and at the same time, secure resources and organizational clout to stay afloat within the cultural field.  

Manc_Keynote Skadi Loist after the keynote, Christian Klesse (c) SQIFF

 

17:30  Film Screening

‘Acting Out: 25 Years of Queer Film and Community in Hamburg’ (Dir. Christina Magdalinou, Silvia Torneden, Ana Grillo, Germany, 2015 85′ (in German with English subtitles)

 

SATURDAY 6TH FEBRUARY 2016

09.00-10.40 Panel 1

Chair: Jackie Stacey, University of Manchester

Guerrilla Warfare’ and Postsocialist Cultural Politics: Beijing Queer Film Festival as Social Activism (Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham)

This paper focuses on the Beijing Queer Film Festival, the longest running queer film festival and one of the best known forms of queer activism in the People’s Republic of China since 2001. Through an analysis of the festival programming, event organisation and the ‘stakeholder configurations’, I discuss the guerrilla warfare’ tactics that the organisers adopt to cope with forced closure from the Chinese government, as well as the ‘postsocialist cultural politics’ that the festival advocates to critically draw on the socialist legacy and to reflect upon the global ‘pink economy’ and transnational LGBT movement. I suggest that the Beijing Queer Film Festival is situated in the global queer film festival circuit in a post-Cold-War world, but it also keeps an ambivalently critical distance from it. By selectively drawing on the socialist forms of event organisation and social mobilisation, in tandem with innovative cultural forms and pressing contemporary agendas, the Beijing Queer Film Festival represents the ‘postsocialist cultural politics’, which forms an ambivalent relationship with both the socialist ‘comrade’ past and the transnational queer present.

The Scottish Queer International Film Festival: Mapping Local and Global Contexts  (Katharina Lindner, University of Stirling)

With a specific focus on the new Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF), this paper explores current manifestations of queer film culture and activism in Scotland. It situates SQIFF within the context of Scottish film culture more generally as well as in relation to the wider context of the (global) queer film festival circuit. It also traces SQIFF’s various collaborative links with other (LGBTI) activist organisations and events.

Queer Cinema in the World (Rosalind Galt, Kings College London, and Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick)

Why think about queer cinema and world politics together? The scenario is familiar to those who follow LGBT politics: global queer cultures clash with local or regional politics. Violence at pride marches in India, Serbia, and South Africa raises questions about the compatibility of liberalism and cultural relativism, global citizenship and human rights, sexual identity and national sovereignty. At the same time, there has been a burgeoning of queer film festivals around the world. These festivals represent a significant way that sexual and gender dissidence makes itself visible in various cultures. In this talk, we do not merely count new queer cinemas as part of a globalized LGBT culture, but consider how queer cinema exhibition makes new worlds. Queer cinema has the potential to foster different accounts of the world, offering alternatives to capitalist aesthetics and social life. This talk examines how international queer film culture proposes new modes of being queer in the world.

 

11:00-12:40 Panel 2

Chair: Katharina Lindner, Stirling

Transnational Investments: Images of Ageing and their Reception Among LGBTQ Film Festival Audiences (Chris Perriam and Darren Waldron, both at the University of Manchester) 

We plan to present part of the outcomes of a three-year project investigating the circulation and reception of LGBTQ films between France and Spain, with a particular focus on festivals. In the project we have been considering whether and how representations from ‘abroad’ matter for audiences elsewhere and feed into their sense of self. This presentation focuses on the festival-based responses to representations of ageing among lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. We show how viewers claim to relate to the images and narratives in two films – Les Invisibles (Sébastien Lifshitz 2012) and 80 Egunean (Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga 2010) – and explore issues and problems around community, affiliation and identification. Many of the films we have looked at engage with aesthetic approaches and activist stances that specifically set out to trouble and undermine the traditional homogenous labels of lesbian and gay: the success or otherwise of this tactic will also be a strand to our presentation.

Transgender activist documentary at LGBTQ film festivals: Audiences and identification (Ros Murray, Queen Mary, University of London)

This paper presents the findings from an LGBTQ audience research project, seeking to question what it means when audience members claim to ‘identify’ with ideas or people that they see on screen. It looks specifically at the case of a transgender documentary, Girl or Boy, My Sex is Not My Gender (Valérie Mitteaux, France 2011), screened at the Festival Internacional de Cinema Gai i Lesbic in Barcelona. The paper explores how audience research can help to negotiate the sometimes difficult terrain in academia between activism and theory, showing us what a film can do, rather than simply represent, for the LGBTQ communities it engages with. Touching on issues of affect, narrative and film form, the paper returns to Thomas Waugh’s claim that ‘lesbian and gay documentarists must develop an independent set of ethical principles suitable to an oppositional or radical film practice’. The paper asks: what principles are relevant to oppositional film practice today, and how does this translate, or not, to contemporary film festival audiences, and in turn, to the academic research context?

Comparative Queer Methodologies and Queer Film Festival Research (Jon Binnie and Christian Klesse, both at Manchester Metropolitan University).

This paper examines the methodological issues in undertaking transnational comparative research on queer film festivals. Feminist and queer postcolonial scholars have drawn critical attention to the politics of comparison in transnational gender and sexual studies, for instance, Pedwell (2010) has examined the rhetorical and material effects of comparison i.e. what is at stake when comparisons are mobilised. In urban geography, Ward (2010) has argued that a renewed critical use of the comparative can help show how experiences and conditions in one urban context can help pose questions about, and inform urban politics in others. In this paper, we explore how a focus on the queer politics of comparison can contribute towards research on queer film festivals. The paper draws on a qualitative research project, which examined 5 queer film festivals in different European cultural geopolitical contexts as sites for the production of visibility, solidarity and queer space, as well as motors for the reproduction of networks around film production, political and educational interventions. The paper discusses the challenges in conducting comparative research in queer film festivals and considers how we might think about the queering of comparison in a grounded, empirical way.

12:40-14:00 Lunch

 14:00-16.00  Panel 3

Chair: Skadi Loist (University of Rostock)

  • 1)    Dagmar Brunow (Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg/International Queer Film Festival Hamburg)
  • 2)    Alex Rumpel (Mezipatra Queer Film Festival)
  • 3)    Andrea Inzerillo (Sicilia Queer Filmfest)
  • 4)    Predrag Azdejkovic (Merlinka International Queer Film Festival)
  • 5)    Noel Sutton (GAZE International LGBT Film Festival)
  • 6)    Berwyn Rowlands (Iris Prize)

16.00-16:30 Break

 16:30-18:30 Panel 4

Chair: Andy Moor (Manchester Metropolitan University)

  • 1)    Jayne Graham Cummings (Queer Vision Film Festival/Queer Film Network)
  • 2)    Theresa Heath (Wotever DIY Film Festival)
  • 3)    Nosheen Khwaja and Cloudberry MacLean (Glitch Film Festival)  
  • 4)    Jamie Starboisky (Queer Media UK)
  • 5)    Zane Hadi (Leeds Queer Film Festival)
  • 6)    Siobhan Fahey (Queerchester Films North West)
  • 7)    Jackie Stacey (Manchester Sexuality Summer School, University of Manchester) and Monica Pearl (University of Manchester)

18:30-18:45 Summing Up
Jon Binnie and Christian Klesse

 19:30-21:00 Bird on Film – Performative Talk with Bird La Bird

Fresh from numerous international successes including a residency at the National Portrait Gallery, we are intensely excited and honoured to offer this special, one off performance from Bird la Bird. Bird la Bird is “a shell-breaking performance artist who puts the camp back in communism and the fun back in feminism”.  Under the streets of Manchester, a new plot against femme-invisibility is hatching! Be there to see it take flight, or miss out!

Bird on Film  

DeepQueer_BirdLaBird_DDBird la Bird on Film (c) Digital Desperados

In her usual charismatic style Bird la Bird will present a curate’s egg of an event. In this performative artist’s talk Bird will show examples of her work that have been influenced by cinema and TV reminiscing on the impact of queer film on her life and art. Bird will show footage of her performance alongside some of her most memorable films including Orlando by Sally Potter and Raspberry Reich by Bruce LaBruce. She will also discuss the impact lesbian and queer filmmakers such as Pratibha Parmar and Campbell X have had on her life, including how she got from sitting in the audience to being on the screen.

Pink Talk: New Queer Cinema

The Pink Apple Lesbian & Gay Film Festival invited me to host a Pink Talk on New Queer Cinema on 6 May 2015 in Zürich.  On this occasion a fabulous group of filmmakers and critic B. Ruby Rich came together to speak about the emergence of New Queer Cinema (NQC) in the early 1990s, its changes throughout the 2000s, its legacy and possible future incarnations.

Pink Talk New Queer Cinema

Pink Talk: New Queer Cinema   (c) Sandra Meier

In attendance were: B. Ruby Rich — inventor of the label NQC, film critic and UCSC professor; Tom Kalin — filmmaker, producer and Columbia University professor, whose debut feature SWOON (1992) was part of the original NQC canon; Cheryl Dunye — filmmaker and teacher at San Francisco State University, whose short films and debut feature THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1996) shaped the NQC from a African-American lesbian perspective; and Mark Christopher, filmmaker and screenwriter, whose short films were part of the movement.

Queer Film Culture: Queer Cinema and Film Festivals conference

Preparations for the international conference “Queer Film Culture: Queer Cinema and Film Festivals” are already underway.  The conference is generously supported by the Körber Funds Nachwuchsforschung at the University of Hamburg and will take place 14-15 October 2014 in conjunction with the 25th Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival (14-19 October 2014).

This two-day international conference hosted by the University of Hamburg, taking place during and in conjunction with the Hamburg International Queer Film Festival will bring together film and festival studies scholars, critics and festival programmers to discuss these issues. Two keynotes delivered by Prof. B. Ruby Rich (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Dr. Marijke de Valck (University of Amsterdam) will frame the conference and bring together the fields of film festival studies and queer cinema. In three panels we will approach Queer Film Culture from various angles. In a first panel, festival scholars will present current research on LGBT/Q film festivals. In a second panel, festival programmers will discuss the current tasks and challenges of LGBT/Q film festivals. In a third panel, film scholars and critics will assess the current trends in queer cinema.

More information about the content, guests and scheduling are available on the conference website: www.queerfilmculture.org.