This piece appeared in the April 2022 issue of Sight & Sound and is reprinted here with permission.
London’s celebration of queer cinema returns to in-person screenings while keeping some of its online offering.
For many in the capital, BFI Flare, London’s LGBTQIA+ film festival, held in March each year, is known as ‘queer Christmas’ – a chance not only to watch films but to gather, catch up, celebrate, maybe even get drunk and have a misjudged snog or cathartic row to boot.
So it was a bitter blow when the festival’s 2020 edition inevitably succumbed to the advent of the pandemic. Online and hybrid versions offered on-demand access to some choice titles under covid conditions but the prospect of Flare making a proper return to BFI Southbank, with the events, talks and club nights that make up a rounded programme, is a truly tantalising prospect.
“Opening up Southbank again is really exciting,” says Grace Barber-Plentie, who joined the Flare programming team this year. “Going hybrid was a great way to connect with a UK-wide audience, who might ordinarily travel to come to the festival. We wanted to combine that with something a bit closer to normal so we’re still using BFI Player but meeting in person is really special.”
Covid constraints notwithstanding, programmers didn’t feel good work was in short supply. “You worry whether there will still be a diverse range of work from around the world but there hasn’t really been a problem. Filmmakers are so resourceful and creative, whether using the home as a location or drawing more heavily on the archive.”
There’s a particularly strong selection of distinctive archival documentaries in this year’s line-up, including Gateways Grind, about nightlife lesbian institution the Gateways, and Framing Agnes, in which luminaries such as Silas Howard, Zachary Drucker and Angelica Ross bring to life rare 1950s interviews with trans Americans.
“Perhaps people being in isolation and having more time to explore the richness of the archive helps,” Barber-Plentie says. “We’re also seeing more stories that are personal to the filmmakers – perhaps there’s more bravery there.” It Runs in the Family, Jimmy in Saigon and Ultraviolette and the Blood-Spitters Gang, for instance, tell the queer stories of a Dominican filmmaker, Vietnam GI and rebellious 1920s teenage girl through the lens of occluded family relationships.
The archival approach overlaps with another strong theme of this year’s Flare programme, around musical performance – especially queer women in music – often explored through investigation of the past. “It’s also about uncovering hidden stories,” says Barber-Plentie. These stories range from Fanny: The Right to Rock, which showcases a rock band comprising queer women of colour that was a favourite of David Bowie’s through to Invisible, about the seldom recognised lesbian writers of so many country and western songs.
Elsewhere metal is the mode uncovered in Sirens and The Sound of Scars while Alone Together looks at the lockdown online community that grew up around pop star Charli XCX. “It’s fascinating seeing queerness across so many genres,” Barber-Plentie notes. “And music is one of the slower things to come back in terms of the pandemic so it’s nice to be able to do that on film.”
Other aspects of the Flare programme include titles focused on the body, such as Long Live My Happy Head, about cartoonist Gordon Shaw’s approach to living with a brain tumour, and I Am the Tigress, about female bodybuilder Tischa Thomas and how her drive to excel comes up again structural considerations around race and gender.
Underground artists are profiled in shorts such as Saintmaking, about Derek Jarman, and There Is a Paradise, focused on Berlin artist Juwelia. More mainstream names come in for reconsideration too, including Marguerite Duras (I Want to Talk About Duras) and Gloria Swanson (Boulevard! A Hollywood Story). Key revivals meanwhile include groundbreaking Guinean teen romance Dakan (1997) and Brazilian underworld biopic Madame Satã (2002).
Highlights from the programme
Girl Picture
This year’s opening film is a charming, spiky coming-of-age drama from Finland. It’s focused on three teens: cynical outsider Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff); Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen), who’s searching for an erotic spark; and Emma (Linnea Leino), a buttoned-up champion figure-skater. Strong, charimatic lead performances make for a compelling ride while director Alli Haapasalo teases out a range of emotional complexities from an ostensibly liberated social setting.
TRAMPS!
The festival’s closing film is a truly transporting love letter to the transgressive grassroots arty party scene that shaped London subculture from punk to the AIDS crisis. Director-writer Kevin Hegge maps this extraordinary cultural landscape through eye-popping archival material and excellent interviews with the likes of Scarlett Cannon, Michael Costiff, Les Child, Philip Sallon, BodyMap, Jeffrey Hinton and Princess Julia – plus the late Duggie Fields and Judy Blame, who steals the show. It’s celebratory but also nuanced, critical and hilarious.
Ultraviolette and the Blood-Spitters Gang
A number of titles at this year’s festival draw on remarkable private archives to illuminate stories of the queer past. This documentary began after the death of French director Robin Hunzinger’s grandmother, when he learned of her teenage relationship in the 1920s with Marcelle – a remarkable woman who, after being sent to a sanitarium, became part of a radical group who called themselves the Blood-Spitters. Personal history links with broader culture and music, set against a mesmerising flow of contemporary archive material.
Benediction
Terence Davies offers a remarkable portrait of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, combining expansive chronological and emotional terrain with an eye for small detail, contained interior space and incremental emotional upheaval. It’s a complex, troubled life that includes seismic liaisons with Wilfred Owen and Ivor Novello, radical resistance and also turns toward church and marriage. Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi play Sassoon in earlier and later life respectively, both with quiet power.
This Is Not Me
Unusually for its region, Iran offers some official acceptance for certain LGBTQ+ subjectivities: specifically, some trans identities under some circumstances. It’s a complex and fraught subject, set against sometimes lethal intolerance for queer lives more broadly. Saeed Gholipour’s film follows two young trans men seeking legal recognition and social freedom, setting their moving journeys against intimately observed Iranian homes, streets, shops and beaches.
Being BeBe
It comes as no surprise that the life of a queer artist is not always an easy one. Emily Branham’s doc follows the first winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2009, BeBe Zahara Benet. It’s a life that touches on migration (in BeBe’s case from Cameroon), family expectations, the vagaries of fame (without the opportunities for fortune enjoyed by later Drag Race winners) and the challenges lockdown brought for live performance culture and careers.
