Tag: Festival

Just how dirty and queer will Fringe! get this year?

Posted on by victorfraga

Some like it hot. Others prefer it dirty. DMovies and the Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest belong to the latter group. Both organisations share the view that cinema should be thought-provoking, transgressive, and constantly challenge the established orthodoxy.

Our affinity is such that we decided to ask some very naughty questions to their amazing team and find out what is it that makes their Fest so singular and special. The directors Alex K plus the programmers Muffin H, Martha M and Sean MG spilled the beans, revealing what what makes a film “trangressive”, why East London and how straight people can enjoy a queer festival. Have a read and find out what they had to say!

Fringe! is a not-for-profit film and arts festival run by a team of passionate volunteers, rooted in London’s queer creative scene and they welcome everyone – particularly dirty boys and girls like YOU! They define their mission as “to offer a dynamic, representative and unmistakably fresh alternative to other film and arts festivals”. The Festival is now on its 7th edition, and the programme this year includes more than 40 events during six days. There are panels, workshops, performances and parties in nine East London venues. There’s no time to get bored, with an international selection of 33 feature and 72 short films, including seven UK premieres.

DMovies – Can you please tell us about curatorship process? How many people are involved, how people can submit their films, the criteria, and so on?

Programmer Sean MG (pictured above) – It’s a cauldron of choice. Some of our Senior Programmers are lucky to catch a glimpse of some truly great stuff at the Berlin Film Festival or Frameline in San Francisco, and we receive hundreds of open submissions online that the whole team evaluates. Sometimes we just know something is perfect, sometimes we have to defend our choices, but it definitely makes for lively debate, which is what you want in a team. We only have a couple of rules though, one of them being NO QUEER DEATH. There are quite enough films where a gay character dies at the end and they’re not stories we want told!

Director Alex K (pictured below) – We have seven people on our programming team who find films through our submissions process, via distributors and via lots and lots of research either by going to other festivals or a good old Google search. Some films also come to us through recommendations by friends and filmmakers we’ve had in previous festivals or through fellow programmers at other festivals. Some films are clear Fringe! material and everyone on the team agrees on having them programmed straight away. Of course a lot of personal tastes comes into this process but every film is watched by more than one programmer before it goes into the programme. Films that often catch our attention: the weird stuff, the stories that haven’t been told and the cheeky.

DMovies – You have described your films as “transgressive” and “progressive”, can you please tell us a little bit more about what makes a film such?

AK – In terms of our programme it’s really those films that challenge the viewer on some level. Queer films that steer away from some of the tropes of ‘gay cinema’ (although we rarely can resist the obligatory shower scene), those films that tell established stories from a new angle, films that aren’t too prudish to show actual queer sex. Anything that resists the drive for assimilation and that is made for a queer audience in mind, rather than a film about queers so straight people can get a safe introduction.

DMovies – You are a “queer” film festival. Can’t straight people be transgressive and progressive?

Head of Programme Muffin H (pictured below): I think that queer sensibility doesn’t have to specifically be connected with sexuality, gender or sexual preference, no.

AK – Of course being straight doesn’t mean you can’t be transgressive or progressive. As much as there are those of a non-heterosexual persuasion that are conservative.

DMovies – Why East (London)? Do the queers elsewhere go to bed too early?

AK – When the festival was founded back in 2011 most of the festival team where either based in East London or partying there, so was a lot of our audience. We had a lot of connections with local venues that let us programme festival events with very short notice (we organised the first festival in less than two months) and a lot of exciting club nights and other events that were more alternative were happening around the area. Of course much has changed in terms of alternative queer culture offerings around London, and we hold the occasional year round event outside of East London, but when it comes to festival time it’s now very much a logistics driven decision to not spread ourselves too thinly geographically.

Programmer Martha M (pictured below) – I mean, the landscape is changing in terms of audience for sure, and one of the things that cements our community’s solidarity is having to protect an area, or re-adjust to the gentrification of this area. Of course the main fringe, for want of a different adjective, cinemas and venues and clubs remain in East, so that’s where we’ll be – though sadly it means lots of our community including myself now have to travel in. Fringe! was initially, after all, borne of a small group of East London queers and within a kind of community network of cinemas, clubs and underground spaces, so has remained local.

DMovies – You’ve been around since 2011. Can you please tell us about your dirty achievements in these seven editions, what you are most proud of?

AK – Queer porn, lots of it really. 2012 was probably the Fringe! benchmark for dirtiness with a brilliant screening of Wakefield Poole’s Bijou soundtracked by artist Prem Sahib while the audience was lounging on sauna mats. There was also an infamous female ejaculation workshop and an equally infamous performance by Diana Pornoterrorismo where she used a microphone to penetrative effect. That year we also opened the festival with Travis Mathews’ I Want Your Love. The film features lots of non-simulated sex and some gays weren’t happy that there was actual rimming on screen – because you wouldn’t do that in real life… Some other dirty highlights over the years include Marit Östberg’s When We Are Together We Can Be Everywhere (2016), and the work by festival regulars Antonio da Silva and Jan Soldat. There are too many to mention.

SMG – There’s a lurid joy sometimes in having extraordinary images or narratives projected on screen, and plenty of times it’s a form of sexual expression that is not palatable to mainstream audiences. It’s not that we want to shock audiences (although sometimes we do – and we laugh!) but it’s that there has to be room for these stories, characters and pleasures to exist and we want to tell them. I joined the team last year and in the “Family” programme there was a 90-second short about coming out. And while we don’t usually go for “coming out stories”, this one was particularly…”penetrative” shall we say. That was fun.

MM – I’m always in awe of the year Fringe! took over an old Catholic school and moved the annual spanking workshop to the altar.

DMovies – What about this year? Can you tell us what’s dirty and new this year?

SMG – While our films are probably more sexy than dirty there are definitely some moments of transgressive filth peppered lovingly throughout. You never know when it’s going to appear on screen

MM – It’s also important to resist sanitisation and assimilation as queers. If this is considered dirty then so be it! I’d say this year’s DIRTIEST are closing film Shua Lea Cheang’s Fluid0 (all the fluid…), Eric Pussyboy Neurosex3 which screens with lesbian porno The Toilet Line (Goodyn Green), and we’ve also got a super crazy, trippy, head-fuck of a film called Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum, the brilliant first feature by early Fringe! filmmaker Madsen Minax.

AK – One of my favourites this year is Who Will Fuck Daddy (Lasse Långström), which pretends to be worried about the patriarchy not having anyone want to fuck it anymore. It’s a hilarious, sarcastic, scathing, and silly film with a lot of strange things happening!

Click here for the Festival programme and follow us on Twitter for our dirty picks and latest updates from the event!

Five dirty picks from the Raindance Film Festival

Posted on by victorfraga

The largest platform for the exhibition of independent cinema in the UK starts this week, for 12 days. The Raindance Film Festival is now on its 25th edition, and it’s hoping to welcome up to 20,000 visitors. It includes a vast selection of features, shorts, documentaries as well as industry events, talks and even a marketplace for industry pundits.

The Festival was established in 1992 by Elliot Grove, the immediately recognisable face running the event to this date. He’s pictured here with his usual silverfox and dark shades look, alongside DMovies’s director Victor Fraga.

Click on the film titles in order to accede to our exclusive review of each dirty gem (well, at least the ones we’ve already seen) And don’t forget to click visit the Festival’s website for more information about the event, and in order to guarantee your ticket or Festival pass right now!

1. The Misandrists (Bruce La Bruce):

We unearthed this dirtylicious gem of transgressive-queer cinema earlier this film, when the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. Not since Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003) have you seen such rabid females repulsed by man. They despise their odour, their presence, their proximity and their existence. They refuse to live in a phallocentric society. What’s more, they do not strive for equality, as they don’t want to mirror themselves against what they see as a corrupt establishment.

Bruce LaBruce’s latest film is a return to the politics of sex, which he explored in minute detail in Rapsberry Reich (2004), plus a commentary on extreme feminism. The female characters here seek “to reconcile the revolutionary need with sexual politics” by rejecting men and setting up their Female Liberation Army (FLA) in an unidentified remote location.

2. The Public Image is Rotten (Tabbert Fiiller):

We uncovered this dirty gem at Tribeca (in New York), also earlier this year. It’s fair to say that the title film title has become far more accurate since Johnny expressed his support for Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Brexit earlier this year. We just don’t know whether he has lost his grip on sanity or is simply infested with ego!

Filmmaker Tabbert Fiiller has worked together with Lydon for four and a half years in order to tell the story of one of the most influential lead singers of all times. Shortly after the Sex Pistols broke up, Lydon travelled to Jamaica. He was in search of who he could become as an artist on his own. But the truth is that John Lydon can never be a solo artist.

The documentary mentions PIL’s first concert in Brussels in 1978. It tells about the many problems John had because there wasn’t enough money to pay for the musicians. Some of his collaborators sampled some PIL’s songs in their own records. Fiiller shows statements and recollections from the past and current band members in order to fill in the gaps and add their own perspectives. Strangely, no film trailer is available.

3. The Nobodies (Juan Sebastián Mesa):

This one comes from last year in Venice, where it snatched the Critic’s Week prize. Shot in black and white and full of heavy metal songs and attitude, The Nobodies centres its narrative on a group of street artists planning to embark on a runaway road trip, leaving behind their tedious lives. The lyrics of the heavy metal tunes played by Pipa and his band elucidate their frustration. The system oppresses them, capitalism sucks, and so it’s time for a revolution, a new solution.

The film investigates the personal stories of the five young people (pictured above), and what triggered their revolt. Medellín is shining with activity, and yet their future does not look very promising. Some of them work as street artists in order to make pocket money. And somehow they feel that they don’t belong in their own homes.

4. Cahier Africain (Heidi Specogna):

This is one we haven’t seen (yet), but have reliably advised of its explosive content. Filmed over 7 years the film bears witness to the collapse of order and civilization in the Central African Republic, a country torn apart by civil war and coup d’états.

The filmmaker explains: “This is a very personal film. On a research trip and by chance, I came upon this book, which led me to seven years of filming. We visited and accompanied the people who described their suffering and shame in the book. Today, the book – along with thousands of other pieces of evidence of war crimes – is locked in the vault at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The fate of the women and their children begotten by force is a tragedy the world turns a blind eye on.

“It’s estimated that, alone in the Central African region in recent years, more than 100,000 women have been violated during armed conflict. After the Rwandan genocide, approximately 20,000 children were brought to life with this background. The film was originally dedicated to the difficult attempts of women to regain a foothold after experiencing violence. However, the renewed outbreak of war in the Central African Republic abruptly rewrote the script”

5. Barrage (Laura Schroeder):

We haven’t seen this one either, but we can’t wait to witness Isabelle Huppert play the mother of her real-life daughter. Barrage is a Luxembourgian film selected for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. It’s not often that the small country draws attention at the event.

It goes like this: “Catherine (Lolita Chammah), a young mother struggling with substance abuse, is determined to rekindle her relationship with her estranged daughter, Alba, who has been in the care of Catherine’s strict and at times overbearing mother, Elisabeth (Isabelle Huppert), since she was two years old. Elisabeth is wary of allowing Catherine back into their lives but reluctantly allows Catherine to spend an afternoon with Alba. She has her own doubts about her unruly mother as their personalities clash.”