Demii Lee Walker in Nosa Eke’s Something in the Closet, one of BFI Flare Five Films for Freedom 2020 selection.
For Sight & Sound’s website, I reviewed this year’s BFI Flare Five Films for Freedom. Here’s how the article begins…
Since 2015, the BFI and British Council have collaborated on a project called Five Films for Freedom, which makes a selection of shorts from BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival available online for free around the world. As the sole digital-only aspect of Flare’s public programme, it’s the only part of the festival to be unaffected by the cancellation of the main 12-day programme at BFI Southbank – known by some devotees as ‘queer Christmas’ – in response to the spread of coronavirus.
The Five Films platform can be found here as planned until Sunday March 29. But the context and content of its selection and strategy can now only be viewed in light of our new situation. These shorts raise questions and concerns whose terms have now shifted, perhaps forever, particularly around the dynamic between the public and the domestic.
How does the urge to congregate openly intersect with the uses of privacy? What kinds of pride are possible without embodied civic interaction? When is the home a sanctuary and when is it a trap? Are biological family bonds more significant than those of chosen family? And how viral is queer itself?
You can read the full article here. (The film links are only live until Sunday March 29 2020.)
