STREAMING

Avant-Drag!

Dir: Fil Ieropoulos; 2024; 90min; Greece; In Greek; Subs: English and German (Audio transcription for deaf and hard-of-hearing in German);

Like a tour guide, a voice introduces us to Athens and bridges the gaps between some of its more underground landmarks: Ten wildly original drag performers, who use their art to tread the space between self and performance. In the realm of their worlds, we encounter different characters; a punky clown that is mostly occupied as a housewife, a turbo-folk girl with Albanian roots, a freewheeling and unsuccessful artist and her daughter who is nourished by videotape of European arthouse films… to name but a few. In a series of vignettes that combine acting, video art, public performance and many other talents, each of them gets to hold the mic to express their art and aesthetic, telling stories about living queerness and performing gender and identity in the Greek capital.

Content notes: blood, mention of: nationalism, police brutality, queerphobia, hate crimes, death.

Má Sài Gòn (Mother Saigon)

Dir: Khoa Lê; 2023; 98min; Canada; In Vienamese; Subs: English

Em đứng lên mùɑ Xuân νừɑ mở
Nụ xuân xɑnh cành thênh thɑng
Ϲhim νề νào ngàу tuổi em trên cành bão bùng

(Here I stand as the spring arrives,
With the greens blossomed and trees abundant,
And the birds returned to these windy branches, having grown old as me)

This lyric from the song Gọi Tên Bốn Mùa (Name of the four seasons, 1974) by Khánh Ly, the “diva of Saigon”, represents the motif of diasporic return and Buddhist-Asian belief in cycle of life. This motif can be found commonly amongst diasporic Vietnamese artists who left the country, with one of them being the filmmaker Khoa Lê. This song appears as a closing soundtrack to his film Mother Saigon, which uses Khoa’s return journey as means of weaving poems written by queer locals with the cinematic landscape of queer kinships in today’s Ho Chi Minh city. This ranges from a performing trope (perhaps “drag”) house, a couple in their pre- and post-gender transition, a party scene, a biological family in process of accepting, and a comment on politics of representation. This “symphony” film is an homage to the notion of home by calling it “Má”:  a bittersweet ode to a comforting yet disturbing mother, to a city that is as liberating as it is oppressive. To a queer lives and generations that grow old and flourish.

Boys in the Water (Les garçons dans l’eau)

by Pawel Thomas Larue; 2023; 39min; France; French; English subtitles

End of summer on the Breton coast. Oscar invites his group of friends to spend a week’s vacation at his grandparents’ house. He hasn’t been back to his childhood home for years – not since he came out as a trans boy. On the beach, the gang meets Malo, a handsome local guy, also trans. The story is about their meeting, which will turn everything upside down.

XPOSED Shorts: Tenderness

Four queer short films from this year’s festival edition tenderly explore romance, grief, illness, and the dream to fly away. Narrative, documentary, and the experimental come together in this shorts program that looks for emancipation under difficult conditions. 

Program length: 95 minutes

EATING PAPAW ON THE SEASHORE, Rae Wiltshire & Nickose Layne, Guayana, 2022, 18 min

BEYOND THE GOLDEN LINE, SJ Rahatoka, Germany & France, 2023, 19 min

FLARE, Kate Blamire, Germany, 2023, 27 min

ENFLIGHTENMENT, TEO Wey Winn, Malaysia, 2023, 11 min

LES SPORTS X-TREM, Gio Ventura, France 2023, 20 min